Thanks everyone for all your help. The presentation went over 2 hours (phew..) and was, I think, a success. The Greenpeace team has heard from their three chosen platforms and is now in huddle mode. In a brief conversation after the presentation we all agreed that this sort of "shoot-out" is only a part of the evaluation process and that they have a lot of considerations - internal and external - to consider. I specifically suggested that once they have a preliminary direction that they make their assumptions about Drupal known to our community. This seems fair since it may very well be that during the presentation we either made errors about capabilities or that there may be mis-understandings and/or mis-communications. Hopefully they will open the discussion up to the larger community.
I would like to keep the Greenpeace group going as a meeting place for people who would like to see Drupal thrive with Greenpeace.
Comments
success!
drob - looks like the presentation was successful.
It would be good for Drupal to know the complaints about basically everything that was given less than an A- or where the other systems got a higher score than Drupal.
Here are the list of items where Drupal got a score below A-.
These seem like they are either around training/support - which I believe they can get from various organizations including Lullabot and from the consulting firm they have decided to use. Or they are around statistics - which makes sense, but I prefer to use the Urchin statistics system because Drupal is a content management system and shouldn't try to create its own statistics package since that is already done so well by other systems. Or, they are around features in Planet2 that Drupal cannot compete with (importing of content from other sites) even though Drupal should and can interface with some other data feeds like Aggregator importing Nodes, but it isn't as clean perhaps as one CMS talking natively to another installation of the same system.
And here the items where an A- or A was lower than the other systems:
Managing multiple sites makes sense to me that it is I can see the issue. The XUL administration interface should help on that front, though.
The WYSIWYG formatting, I've always used TinyMCE for people who want that and they are happy with it.
The logical, rationalised categorisation system - what doesn't Taxonomy provide on this front? Or is it just that taxonomy is seen as "too complex" compared to the Planet2 system that they already know?
Again - congratulations to you on this presentation and in representing the Drupal community. The feedback from this customer is very valuable in my mind and I hope that we can understand it and capture it into specific issues to be tackled in future releases of Drupal.
Regards,
Greg~
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
On specific feature scores
Hi, Greg!
I've gone through the requirements you pulled out of our spreadsheet and have reviewed your comments. I think you've already answered your own questions for the most part, but I've added my own here in case they're of any value :)
B+: 00111 As a Content Editor I would like to have support and service level agreements in place so that I know what the steps are should a problem occur, and so that I know what to expect in terms of service levels
You're right – this requirement has to do with support once the new Greenpeace UK site has been launched. It doesn't have anything to do with with Drupal per se.
B+: 00126 As a User I would like to be able to login globally and have services integrated so that I can seamlessly navigate between international and UK issues
Here, Greenpeace UK users want to log into the Greenpeace UK site, then navigate to another Greenpeace site (e.g. Greenpeace Canada), and still be logged in, or at least, to be able to log in to that Greenpeace site using the same login information. I believe this could be achieved if all Greenpeace sites were running on Drupal, but will be trickier given they aren't. Single sign-on is a technical challenge no matter what technology you're using, though. Any recommendations here on how we should approach this would be appreciated :)
B: 00109: As a Content Editor I would like to go through CMS training so that I know how to use the new system
Again, this has less to do with Drupal than with training, as you point out :)
B-: 00040 As a Content Editor I would like to have better and easier user stats reporting so that I can get to know our users and their habits to improve content, navigation, browser support, fundraising etc.
I agree with you here as well - it makes more sense for Greenpeace UK to use a stats package than to want stats from Drupal.
C+: 00061 As a Content Editor I would like to have CMS stats (e.g. broken links / downloads / images report, number of pages in each campaign, number of files uploaded, total pages) so that I can easily keep track of useful site statistics, and make changes/fixes based on accurate information
See above.
F-: 00061 As a Content Editor I would like to have CMS stats (e.g. broken links / downloads / images report, number of pages in each campaign, number of files uploaded, total pages) so that I can easily keep track of useful site statistics, and make changes/fixes based on accurate information
This appears to be a duplicate of the above – the score for 00061 was C+ (not F-).
A- to A+ for other two: 00063 As a Content Editor I would like to be able to manage multiple sites through a single content management system so that I don't have to switch between systems or maintain static sites to do my job
This is an important feature for Greenpeace UK – the web team is responsible for managing the http://greenpeace.org.uk site but also a bunch of campaign and product sites (e.g. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/Products/Toxics/, http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/Products/GM/, etc.), and would like to manage all of these through a single system. The web team scored Plone and Planet 2 higher than Drupal on this requirement.
We'll be sure to look at the XUL adminstration interface, though - thanks for that.
A for Drupal to A+ for Plone: 00074 As a Content Editor I would like to have WYSIWYG and formatting tools so that I can quickly create formatted content without needing to know/use HTML
This is a pretty subjective thing, but the team scored Plone higher on its WYSIWYG tools. I can't tell you exactly why (without looking at their individual scores and interviewing the low scorers).
A for Drupal to A+ for Planet 2:00001 As a Content Editor I would like to have a logical, rationalised categorisation system so that categorisation is quicker, easier and less cumbersome and more effective
The Planet 2 categorisation system has been designed and customised for Greenpeace – many of the content categories the Greenpeace UK web team would use are already in place in Planet 2 and little configuration would be required to get up and running.
Best,
Rob
wonderful
Thanks so much Rob.
In summary it sounds like a lot of the problems were related to organizational problems moving to a new system (e.g. the categorization) or problems common to many environments and not always deficiencies in the Drupal system in general.
For single-sign-on, I haven't used it, but you may look at the pubcookie module and/or LDAP based solutions.
The XUL administration system would help - two other options are to use the multisite feature which at least cuts down on "managing" the updates to the code and then the other option is that the Product sub-sites that you pointed to strike me as just being a collection of content, in a specific URL, that has a slightly different theme. For that you can use Taxonomy theme to get a different look for pages with different terms (e.g. a "GM" term and a "Toxics" term).
I just looked at Epoz (one of the main WYSIWYG editors for Zope/Plone) and it appears to be basically the same as TinyMCE - the difference was small anyway.
So, I think you made the right decision in the end ;) and it's good to know that most of the problems are not areas that need work.
If anything in Drupal needs work as a result of this review - a bit of improvement on statistics and also in "single-sign-on" but those are tough areas and they are getting some attention...
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
stats
Yes, a dedciated statistics package is better in most respects and is the way to go. I will also mention xstatistics which is designed to provide little more view into information already collected and may serve as a starting point to extend statistics within a Drupal site.