Welcome to the local government group! Open thread

I'd love to try to make the upcoming Natick meetup, but will be out of town. I made a site for my small town's planning board:

http://pb.wiltonnh.org

I'm interested in helping advocate Drupal for other local governments, as the proprietary products out there are pretty expensive and not nearly as flexible.

Hi, I'm the IT critter for the Town of Brewster on Cape Cod. I first came across Drupal a few years ago when we were looking at refreshing our site and I was trying to fight off the heavy marketing of that proprietary "Online Village Officebuilding" software that I think we all know. Given that my own personal site sees 3x the traffic of the towns and I was paying $6 a month, somehow $14k+$4k/year seemed more than excessive and straight into the category of loot and pillage. We ended up going with Joomla over Drupal because at the time it seemed Drupal development had stalled and Joomla had an easier configuration out of the box. Since then, the lack of permissions is more and more a hassle and the format is very heavily stilted to a standardized top page with news announcements--particularly a problem since you have to give admin control panel access to anyone who does more than post news. This group has absolutely perfect timing as I got an invitejust as I had put up a test Drupal 6 site to consider it for a major site revamp.

For our needs, ease of use is the priority. In approaching our current site with Joomla, I found the biggest barrier for users was that most items came from badly formatted (ten thousand spaces to push something to the next line--that kind of thing) MS Word documents. That meant an editor plugin that could convert documents that were messed up from the start as well as being burdened with all the Microsoft formatting nonsense and do so with little more than a cut and paste into a form.

Our requirements for a site are fairly simple, a site where depts and committees can maintain their own page with links to forms and information and if necessary can bump those to the front page and set a sunset date. Self-maintenance promotes them actually getting information online because they (rather than me) will be the ones blamed if it is not there. We've had big problems with people just plain not putting their documents up, whether themselves or through me, because they don't use the net themselves and simply don't think of it or consider it important.

We have found that agendas while a favorite of good govt groups are almost never read and clog the site, so we are going to integrate them with a universal meeting calendar rather than cluttering committee subpages with them as we do now. We may use that as our internal method for scheduling rooms, but I've had some resistance because, of course, change is bad. Minutes are another favorite demand, but again in the real world don't get a lot of use. I'm thinking of adding a subpage to each committee to keep them out of the way. I really want multiple categorization so I can bump the things that people actually use (job listings, transfer station schedule, tax bill information) to multiple places without having to worry about having multiple copies to update (or the to forget to).

Hi,

Love Drupal. We have been running Drupal for the last two years for our external Website: http://www.busselton.wa.gov.au/ (3000+ pages and ~ 4500 hits a day) We also use Drupal for our Intranet (830+ pages and ~ 900 hits a day), and a separate IT Intranet.

At the moment I handle the Drupal technical side of things and another person is the content and views guru. We try and have two people from each Department responsible for their sections of information. I sometimes call on an outside Drupal consultant if I am too busy to handle something.

We have recently set up a working group to overhaul our Intranet as we need to restructure/categorise the pages better. I have recently upgraded our old NEC PABX with the OSS Asterisk PABX, another goals is to create a custom Drupal Staff Directory page. From there staff will be able to call another staff member by just clicking on the phone extension.

I have written shell scripts to backup the sites to an internal backup server, store scripts and configs in a Subversion repository and have started on a script that helps me update Drupal. An after hours fun project was to write a shell/PHP bunch of scripts that is called via Cron daily and emails me the previous days 'page access' time summery - Min/Max/Avg. No. of pages over 2000mSec etc. Sort of a confidence tool. I have also written some web scripts to help me isolate who is looking at my site. I use gplot and jQuery to show a plot of page access times vs. date/time. I can then drill down to isolate a smaller sample of data and then list out the pages that where being viewed and who was viewing them. It's amazing the number of search engines hits (high) vs. people hits (low). I have wondered if I should ban search engine indexing during the day, and only allow them access during the wee hours of the night.

My wish list for using Drupal in Local Government would be to have (in no special order):

1. A semi automated upgrade process. Why are we all having to do this manually, or write our own scripts?
2. Better document/file handling eg. processes to handle orphaned files
3. Better logging of who has created/edited what and when.
4. A better mechanism to move/export/import pages from one Drupal site to another
5. An easy process/module to replicate the Production site to a Training, Test or Dev site.

Paul Hamilton