WhiteHouse.gov Releases Second Set of Open Source Code

[The Straight Story]

WhiteHouse.gov Releases Second Set of Open Source Code

Friday morning at the Tech@State event at the State Department, the White House's New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open source community that powers the Drupal content management system.

Last April, we released four modules for the Drupal community, which focused on the scalability, communication, and accessibility of our site.

Today’s code release constitutes a few modules we developed for ourselves, as well as a recognition of our sponsoring the development of modules widely used in the Drupal community, which improve the administration of our site in a variety of ways: file management, content presentation, and URL shortening are just a few examples.

For the code originating from within the White House, we wanted to improve the functionality offered by a popular file manager, IMCE, so we developed a module called IMCE tools, which has three major functions:

First, IMCE Directory Manager provides an interface for specifying which directories a user can access via the IMCE module. It is useful when you have users which have the same user roles but need to be confined to directories which cannot be derived from user data.

Second, IMCE Search allows for searching for files in the IMCE interface which helps identify the location of uploaded files.

Third, IMCE File Path easily presents the url of a file, facilitating sharing it as a link.

We also recognize that there are really good projects already embedded in the Drupal community and reached out to help support their development. Several of these are used in the collaboration software suite, Open Atrium: Features, Spaces, Boxes, Context, StrongArm, and Admin. We also supported the development of an auto-tagging module, Calais, a bulk file uploading utility, IMCE SWFupload, as well as the module that powers our shortened wh.gov domain, shortURL.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/11/whitehousegov-releases-second-set-open-source-code

[tabatha]

1. Thanks for that.

I have been meaning to start on Drupal 7 soonish; this is interesting.

[wtmusic]

2. Excellent.

I hope they work better than most of the Drupal modules out there.

[tabatha]

3. Have you used Drupal?

What do you think of it?

[wtmusic]

4. I'm in the middle of a large Drupal project

and have mixed feelings.

I'm used to coding everything myself and am a perfectionist about getting pixels to line up, etc. - it's pretty sloppy in that regard. Also, the Drupal installation I'm working with has literally thousands of files. That kind of bloat makes it nearly impossible to get simple things to happen consistently, especially since the modules tend to be buggy.

That said, it allows clients to change page copy themselves, it automates many otherwise-mundane chores (creating site maps, keywords for all pages, print versions of pages, etc.). I'm still not at the point where I would endorse it on a new site, but trying to keep an open mind.

[tabatha]

5. Thanks.

I liked the idea that it provided canned routines for stuff I did not to want to waste time writing.

But for the last six months, I have been following this status site:

http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?version<0>=156281&status<0>=1&status<1>=8&status<2>=13&status<3>=14&priorities<0>=1&categories<0>=bug&categories<1>=task

and cannot believe how many bugs there are, and how long they take to fix.

The critical list goes down to almost zero, and then increases up to more than 5 again, then goes back down, and then up gain.

The major list has been a steady 4-5 pages long for over 6 months. Amazing.

[wtmusic]

6. Yeah it's weird.

I once lost out on a big job for a payroll company because at the time I didn't know much about Drupal. I had my own CMS that I had written which was very basic, but fast as lightning and rock solid. They didn't want to go with a proprietary system, which I understand too.

When I got the call to do this job I just told them I knew Drupal and have been learning by the seat of my pants, but with the time I've spent working around the bugs I could have done everything by hand several times over!

Is most of your work web programming?

[tabatha]

7. No, web programming is a hobby....

that I do for myself and a couple of environmental institutions on a voluntary basis.

As a job, I do C++ programming that provides a user interface to a few different hardware devices (driver interfacing required there, too), and involves the manipulation of images. Fun stuff, but limited market.

I have ideas for a web site of my own to sell some things I hope to make. Hence, the no rush - but I think I will have to start digging into it soon, even if just to learn Drupal because there are probably a few months learning curve. But, I wanted to wait for Drupal 7 release, and then when it was released, I saw that the bugs were many.

[wtmusic]

8. If you're planning on using it for e-commerce I'd be wary.

My client makes secure hard drives for defense, and they want to begin selling to the consumer market. Their former developer set them up with Drupal and a shopping cart called Ubercart.

The developer got fired because he couldn't finish the job, and I'm starting to see why. :crazy:

[tabatha]

9. Seems as though Ubercart has a successor

http://www.drupalcommerce.org/

but still early days.

[wtmusic]

10. Thanks, had not heard about this. nt