Proposal for the new group web infrastructure SFT Group meeting 3/7/2009 Yves Perrin

Outline background what is Drupal maintenance aspects proposed production architecture proposed overall infrastructure status conclusion

Background March 2009: meeting on web requirements Inputs : SPI and Geant4 … several technologies, servers, tools Virtualization … Monkey wiki: authent, RSS feeds but NO fora Root … DRUPAL content management system (CMS) Outputs : SPI proposes to follow up on a Drupal based solution by: setting up a 'ROOT like' Drupal instance producing a 'work book‘ allowing others to create more instances Pedrag offers a virtual machine, Carlos set it up April 2009: starts evaluating customization May 2009: setting up taxonomy based FAQs June 2009: several instances on single server

english rendering of dutch word ‘druppel’ (water droplet ) originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board became open source project in 2001 modular Content Management System (CMS) php + mysql small personal blogs to large corporate sites designed to allow third parties additions  Content Management Framework ‘Drupal core’ + contributed modules and themes What is Drupal?

Large community 500,000 user accounts on Drupal.org over 2000 people signed up for developer accounts. last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon Washington DC 2009, attracted over 1400 people last European conference, Drupalcon Szeged 2008 had an attendance of 500. many active Drupal forums, mailing lists and discussion groups. over 20 national communities around drupal.org offering language-specific support.

Site customization via … Theme Selection (page layout & corporate look & feel) Module Selection and configuration e.g: Wysiwyg authoring editors Access Control: Roles and Permissions Taxonomy (association of nodes with descriptive terms to organize content) sensible URLs and URL aliasing RSS feeds

… but not suited for

Drupal Modules extend the functionality of the drupal core enabled by the administrator core modules for: RSS Feeds forums comments descriptive URLs multi-site support multi-user content creation and editing security/new release update notification user profiles access control (user roles, IP addresses, ) etc contributed modules ( several hundreds! )

Drupal Themes Customize the site look-and-feel using: ‘core themes’ ‘contributed themes’

If necessary, PHP code can be entered to generate the page (e.g. form+handler) Page authoring

The site admin registers two users named: pedestrian savprojadmin and … User administration

Taxonomy based access savprojadmin can access both: ‘content for all’ and ‘content for project admin only

pedestrian can access ‘content for all’ but is not shown ‘content for project admin only’ Taxonomy based access

Objectives reminder one SFT site + one site per SFT hosted project encourage a common solution similar (?) look and feel minimize maintenance efforts

Maintenance

Status Report

single server instance specific directories for: settings files etc single PHP Drupal codebase Apache virtual hosts SFT web SPI web Geant4 web Mysql databases Multiple sites architecture

Drupal (production) prod dirs Drupal validation new version mysql Apache val dirs Dual version multiple sites

Status FCKeditor installed FAQ installed taxonomy based access installed 2 instances running automatic back-ups to be set-up shibboleth to be installed instance creation doc to be completed Drupal validation infrastructure to be set up

Conclusion definitely very useful: good match with our requirements potential for site evolution support from a large community Usability and documentation can sometime be confusing but improvement on these issues has top priority in Drupal 7