20120531 CU Drupal SIG meeting minutes

We met May 31 in MANN B30A classroom, which seemed to work out ok, though folks in the back were a bit far away. Acoustics are good though, and having computers could be helpful for future meetings if we do working sprints. Will try next meeting there as well.

Agenda:

* Cornell Drupal Group on Drupal.org, sign up here: http://groups.drupal.org/cornell-university

* Enterprise Hosting:
      o who has researched what hosts, and are there recommendations?
      o Yamin Chevallard talked about CIT's decision to look for external enterprise hosting, rather than try to set up a LAMP stack solution. Cost of developing and maintaining hosting like this has proven too high, contracting externally could prove less expensive if it can met campus needs.
      o Dirk Swart mentioned there was a Campus Drupal Steering Committee meeting later in the day to discuss campus needs, costs, time frame, etc
      o Yamin suggested that this group should make our "wants" known to the decision makers. He also thought this group would be great for peer level support as different groups move into Drupal development at different times.
      o Eric Banford mentioned that CALS looked at Pantheon and Acquia, both have similar tools for import/export, dev/staging/prod environments, rollback, GIT or SVN support, DRUSH and more. Acquia supports multi-site, Pantheon currently doesn't but talks of supporting it in the future.
      o In general, Pantheon caters slightly more to developers and making development easy, whereas Acquia focuses on enterprise support and managed hosting. Though they do each offer "wild west" and "white glove" options. Pantheon's white glove service is through Chapter 3: http://www.chapterthree.com/
      o Acquia has loads of great videos, some free, most at a cost.
      o For a quick site, Yamin suggested using Cornell Blogs, a Wordpress service: http://blogs.cornell.edu/
      o Someone mentioned Cherry Hill, they look like a Drupal shop focused on services rather than hosting (from the web site, anyway): http://chillco.com/
      o Yamin mentioned either Pantheon or Acquia guarding module use closely, if you add a custom module that uses excessive CPU they will flag it and recommend changes (my notes are spotty here). David thought being able to submit modules for review, even at a cost, could be advantageous.

* Core Modules
      o Which are most useful and what people are doing with them?
      o Discussion of current module research/use is posted on Drupal.org Cornell group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/229963
      o When considering hosting, need to keep in mind what core modules they offer, and how they handle custom modules. Some projects will be fine with standard modules, some will REQUIRE custom module development
      o Christina Brasfield noted: while having a set of “core contributed” modules is useful, one of the best things about Drupal is its flexibility. If working on large sites that offer a myriad of options, developers need module access. The whole purpose of a dev environment is to experiment and break stuff – that’s what makes it fun.

* Custom Module Development, potentially sharing modules that would be helpful for CU related activity
      o CUWebAuth sign on
      o News
      o Events
      o Faculty and other profiles (John Fereira of Mann mentioned already having a way to do this for the library, pulling data from Vivo)

* Authoring experience for contributors
      o David wondered how much you could restrict content contributors? Can you limit the styling they can apply?
      o Christina said that out-of-the-box, editing is pretty limited, and you can customize what the contributors are able to do
      o John said Mann added a plugin to their editor which hides all html, javascript and any code from contributors
      o David thought we would have to keep reevaluating the core modules as they evolve

* Campus Drupal community communication
      o Using Drupal.org group for now, may set up -L list serve later if needed.

* Data Security
      o Need to find out from hosts if they can secure data. HIPAA and FERPA.
      o Yamin said they likely could but it might impact cost of hosting

* Next steps?
      o Steering Committee is evaluating hosts, Dirk said he would report back to this group what was discussed. There will be a sub committee to ask hosts about technical issues.
      o David Demello suggested a SIG meeting to discuss Drupal development strategies, best practices, navigation, site architecture, etc. Since many are just getting started or considering getting into Drupal, learning from those further along the learning curve would be appreciated. Mann Library, Olin Library and University Communications have been very helpful in sharing what they have learned.
      o Will schedule next meeting in 2 weeks to keep things moving along.