Posted by ccloyd on June 27, 2012 at 3:55pm
My agency is looking into GovDelivery services and I am wondering if anyone has experience with them. Specifically how well do their services integrate with Drupal? I saw there was a GovDelivery Integration module. It doesn't look like it gained much traction and isn't actively maintained.
I know the White House has used GovDelivery and Drupal. I was wondering if anyone knew at what level of integration. My initial thoughts are the listserv capabilities may be useful. However, I feel their auto-notification services for content updates could be done inside Drupal.
Any advice or experiences to share would be appreciated.
Comments
yes
At DoED we had to modify Views and D6 Core (!) to get GovDelivery to understand our RSS feeds.
RSS feeds in GovDelivery
Thanks for the quick reply. I have a few follow-up questions from your comment.
Is RSS feeds used by GovDelivery to notify subscribers of changed/added content? Or is that the best solution to integrate with Drupal?
Were there extensive modifications to Views and D6 core? Have you had issues with upgrades to either since the modifications?
I really don't like the idea of modifying core or views.
no longer there
I'm no longer at DoED, so I can't comment on how hard it has been to maintain 8-))). When I was there, our process was to reintegrate patches we made for each new Drupal release, and sometimes those required refactoring our patches. As I recall, these patches to core and views weren't huge or difficult; it was more difficult to find the particular spot that was problematic rather than fixing the problem.
To my knowledge, RSS was working fine from the end users' points of view with GovDelivery, and I don't know the reason for the switch. Perhaps to get all Gov feeds in one place, or to widen the audience that might access ED feeds? I am unsure. By the time it came to me, it wasn't "Can we use GovDelivery?" or "We want to use GovDelivery, what would it take to get it working?", it was "we turned on GovDelivery a while ago and they are complaining. Fix it!"
I haven't done this myself, but I believe a coworker has gotten D7 to serve valid W3C RSS by using views_rss and rss_field_formatters. http://drupal.org/project/rss_field_formatters. You might want to try that before hacking code.
Good luck!
Maintainer's Perspective
There's only two good reasons to use the GovDelivery Integration module:
1. Tight webform integration for subscription signups.
2. Switching the Drupal Mail Handler to the GovDelivery On Demand Mailer.
If all you're doing is subscription signups you might be better served with GovDelivery's built-in options.
FYI - GovDelivery Integration module now has a 7.x-1.x-alpha branch.