UMass Drupal User's Group meeting - Thursday Dec 3

This Users Group meeting is Thursday, December 3 at 2pm in ISB 145.

Meetings are open to anyone interested in Drupal and not limited to the UMass Amherst community. Bring problems, questions and ideas. Offers to make presentations are welcome.

Meet at the UMass Integrated Sciences Building (ISB) (See map here.
Room 145 is a meeting room near the elevators on the first floor.

Regular meetings for the UMass Amherst Drupal Users Group are the first Thursday of the month.

Agenda:
- Introductions
- Open topics: discussion, problems, show and tell, best practices, etc.

Please post here if you have questions or wish to address a topic at the meeting.

Please use the 'Signup' feature on this events page for a reminder.

Meeting Notes

Attending

Gary Parker
Dan Harper
Nick Scarrci
Brian DeVore
Max Israel
Samm Delorey
Steve Brewer
Kevin Wiliarty
Sarah Ryder
Joanne Patalano
Matthew Mattingly

Presentation by Gary Parker: Drupal 8 at UMass

UMass IT will definitely be supporting D8, but needs to address issues of authentication and infrastructure.

Authentication requires three modules, Shibboleth authentication, Shibboleth Shibboleth User Provisioning, and UMass Auth. None are in D8, so we will need to either port them, or adopt a different, non-Shibboleth signon method.

Shibboleth provides more integration with other attributes, so is the better alternative. Porting the modules will entail cooperation with local institutions using shib and Drupal.

Data Center migration currently taking priority but when done, will provide infrastructure for multiple PHP versions, etc.

The infrastructure piece involves updating PHP. To do so on the same system as the older Drupal sites would break them, so IT will be setting up a system to route Drupal sites to environments with correct PHP version,

As IT has stated before, support for Drupal 6 will be shut down three months after its official end of life. Originally this was set to coincide with the release of D8, but Drupal has set it back to February 24, so IT will support D6 until May 24.

UMass is not supporting Backdrop (a fork of D7, meant to be an alternative to D8), but will host it on the Appserver.

Discussion

Hampshire College is currently redoing Intranet, not in a rush to do D8
Palantir.net - recommends skipping a version

Migration from D7 to D8 could be prohibitively complex; Backdrop could provide alternative

Is Pressflow providing support for D6?

D8 implements things in a less “Drupal specific” way - more in inline with other languages

Proposal: Tech talk for campus on D8?

Modules are available to back port features from D8 to D7

Zen theme in D8 integrated with git, guzzle, node.js, bower

Configuration management- D8 provides tool similar to Features but intended to move a single site through development, staging, and production - not for cross site installation of new features

Linux Containers

like VM, but virtualizes the application.
provides lightweight building blocks of web server, database etc
can build a local environment replicating production environment
can config to update components, etc
provides an easy way to move site through workflow
uses load balancing - developed by Google

better security - even if one site compromised the hacker can’t escape to larger environment
can limit memory for each site
good management tools

Discusion re hosting, Vagrant, etc

UMass has investigated Acquia and Pantheon as hosting services = too much $$

Pantheon has introduced education pricing
Acquia provides patching and updates

Vagrant - Gail set up - easy on Mac, horrible on Win, finicky in general

Hampshire use to set up for workstation for coding without giving server access or setting up environment directly in workstation

Question re new PCI requirements for TLS 1.2: Our servers are good!

Question re using migrate module to export content types etc:
need to look at starting site - but might be better constructing feeds
feeds - can now consume images?
use xml formatter for views => xml parser in feeds

Question: How to get feedback on code - Stack exchange, etc?

github, community forums, use our Drupal group to post requests for feedback

JQuery as topic for meeting?

D8 makes jQuery easier

Using jQuery to do client side calculations - UMACC giving page
http://www.umass.edu/umacc/

Announcements

March 18, 2016 - HighEdWeb New England at Mt Holyoke

ne.highedweb.org

Larry Garfield Presentation on basic D8 development

We can't get room first Thursday in March will try to schedule second Thursday.