
Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal - drewjaja
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/544726/australian_government_likely_standardise_drupal/
======
etfb
I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of
australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that
they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was,
because their decision making was _hideous_ ), so they decided not to renew my
contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took
what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane,
and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong
focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or
non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original
Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won
awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane.

Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media
were invited -- and I was very pointedly _not_ invited, presumably because
they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then
the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from
the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side
of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that
German word is for "serves you right, you bastards".

Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now,
so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...

~~~
epenn
_So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you
right, you bastards"._

Schadenfreude.

~~~
etfb
Gesundheit!

------
jacques_chester
It has been my experience that nobody takes AGIMO seriously.

They do a lot of research, produce a lot of reports, publish a lot of
"standards", and then everyone else just ignores them and stumbles on with
whatever they were doing before.

The people who are already married to some solution will remain married to
their solution; they will successfully argue for exemptions.

Those who are determined to use something else will use political capital to
get another exemption.

Those who are forced to make the switch will make the switch, but the old
system will probably hang around for a long time, more than doubling the
overall cost due to double-entry and errors.

Some will make the transition, it will fail, then transition back.

In the end the government standard will be taken up by a handful of sites,
AGIMO or its heirs and successors will declare total success, the Minister
will have been rotated to something else or kicked out at an election and
nobody will give two hoots.

Welcome to public sector computing! It's like enterprise, except even crazier.

------
jqm
FTA- '''

"GovCMS is intended to support more effective web channel delivery functions
within Government, and enable agencies to redirect effort from non-core
transactional activities, towards higher-value activities that are more
aligned with core agency missions," a draft statement of requirements issued
by AGIMO states.

'''

It appears buzzword abuse is becoming an international problem across multiple
industries and agencies. I recommend a UN task force to look into it and take
the appropriate measures. Sanctions are defiantly in order, but at this point
nothing should be off the table.

------
danso
I don't know if the U.S. federal gov can be said to have "standardized" on
Drupal, but parts of it are still run on Drupal, including Whitehouse.gov.

However, there used to be more U.S. Drupal sites, including Data.gov...there
was even some hubabaloo about them releasing the source code:

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-
globa...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-global)

[https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808](https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808)

Viewing the source code of the current data.gov (view-
source:[http://www.data.gov/](http://www.data.gov/)), it looks like the moved
it to WordPress. That's a pretty damning migration.

Edit:

The current repo for Data.gov can be found on Github -
[https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/](https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/)

Here's the shit-show that was apparently Data.gov's Drupal installation:
[https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7](https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7)

And quite humorously, it seems to be something that we're exporting to other
governments, such as India
[https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-
beta](https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta)

~~~
fredsted
Looks like that site uses WordPress for the index site, but as soon as you
make a search you are redirected to a site based on something called CKAN
([http://ckan.org](http://ckan.org)), a dedicated data searching engine.
Probably better than Drupal for that purpose anyhow. Can't see how that is
damning for drupal.

~~~
danso
CKAN has been around for awhile AFAIK, back even in the Drupal 5.x days, there
was a CKAN module for Drupal.

From CKAN's webpage:

[http://ckan.org](http://ckan.org)

> _Strong integration with third-party CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress_

There was no explicit reason to switch front-end sites...But think about
it...creating Data.gov was a large endeavor, but it's certainly not a mission
critical one. Just a couple years after building that initiative from scratch,
they throw out Drupal for WordPress instead of using their existing Drupal
installation and installing CKAN modules. How does that not reflect badly on
Drupal, which bills itself as a much more powerful, flexible CMS than your
standard blog system?

~~~
fredsted
Yes you are right about that, but I'm thinking that Drupal was the wrong
backend for that system to begin with. If you're using the wrong tool, it's
the makers of the system that are at fault, not Drupal. I mean Drupal is used
by many popular sites with success, most are switching _to_ Drupal, not from
it. As you say, Drupal is a CMS system. It's not a data platform. Think
newspapers vs data.gov. From my perspective you could make data.gov in Drupal
no problem, but that doesn't mean you couldn't do it better, faster, easier
with some more specialized software. CKAN does all these things Drupal does
not ([http://ckan.org/features/](http://ckan.org/features/)) that 99% using
Drupal don't need. Looking at that it seems strange to me they chose Drupal to
begin with.

~~~
danso
Yes...you and I are in agreeance here...and to be fair to the government, I
would argue 99% of clients don't exactly know what they need. I'm not arguing
that Drupal is _always_ wrong, or that it is inherently bad...I'm arguing that
it provides too much for what users actually _need_...that it was dropped for
Wordpress is an indication that they thought Drupal itself could be the data-
handling platform. Hell, they probably don't even need WordPress and could
probably do much of it in Jekyll or some other static deployment.

I used Drupal back in the 5.x days and thought it was pretty swell, but that
was when I was a rookie developer who had almost no real full-stack dev
experience. Now I can't think of a single use case in which Drupal's purported
feature set is needed that would not be better fulfilled by just going to
Django/Rails. The hackery that seemingly has to be done to meet clients'
perceived needs almost eliminates whatever advantage Drupal in terms of a
community of knowledgable developers to hire from. And I would question
whether there are really more Drupal-only developers than Rails-only
developers (certainly, there are way more Wordpress developers).

------
noir_lord
I worked with Drupal for 2 years (built a specific niche business social
network on top of it) and it was the _worst_ two years of my life as a
programmer.

I literally will not touch Drupal projects, I'll go back to working retail
before I'd be a Drupal developer again, it is an unremittingly awful platform
to work on.

The front end experience is horrible (even with all the tweaks in the world),
CCK/Views made it just about useful then they rolled that into core but only
some of it, you can forget an upgrade path between major versions in any real
world scenario, the hook system is just plain bonkers.

I honestly don't know how it got a reputation as the goto open source
enterprise CMS, Joomla must have been truly terrible for Drupal to be the
preferred solution.

In the time I spent beating that monstrosity into shape I could have built the
same functionality in a fraction of the time using something like Symfony.

This was in the days of the 6 to 7 rollover, things may have improved, frankly
I've very carefully not looked.

~~~
rjknight
I'm afraid it's rather like anything else - Drupal works well for people who
understand what it's good for. In particular, it's good for content
management, where 'content' is loosely defined as 'stuff in a database that
people want to edit and publish'.

The 'bonkers' hook system is basically just aspect-oriented programming. It's
not to everyone's taste but it's not as though you can't figure out how it
works. It's just not a typical MVC web framework, and MVC web frameworks have
mostly won (which is why Drupal 8 is going to be built around Symfony
components, but that's another story).

I dispute that an experienced Symfony dev could build the same functionality
as an experienced Drupal dev in less time. You could skew the test either way
by picking requirements that favour one platform over the other, but for most
general case content management (including user-generated content)
requirements you'll be able to do it quicker in Drupal, mostly because you
won't have to write boring stuff like:

* User management

* Roles and permissions

* Login, password reset, activation

* Basic editorial UI

* RSS feeds

* Custom content types

* Wysiwyg editing (admittedly this can be a pain to configure)

* Logging

* Caching, including Varnish integration, Memcache etc.

* Indexing of content into Solr/Elasticsearch

And so on. Most of that stuff is plug and play, and if you're happy to accept
the (very real and sometimes painful) limits that come with Drupal then you
can almost always deliver functionality faster by using open source modules
wisely.

In general, I rarely agree with people who say "<popular piece of
software/programming language/library> is an unusable piece of crap" because
the evidence appears to suggest that other people _are_ using it effectively.
The fact that you didn't enjoy it doesn't automatically make it bad software
(nor does it make _you_ a bad developer for not enjoying it or figuring out
how to use it effectively). Most successful systems do at least some things
really well, even if they get a lot of other things badly wrong, and
dismissing them makes it harder to learn from the things that they do well.

For my part, I wouldn't exactly describe Drupal development as _fun_ ,
compared to Ruby or Clojure. However, it can be scarily effective in the right
hands.

~~~
noir_lord
I'm not really sure how to respond to that since we are in the realm of
personal opinion.

I've built custom CMS's for clients that where a much closer fit with their
existing workflows that implemented most of the list above (not everyone
requires everything above) and I've done it at least as quickly as doing it
from scratch in Drupal would have (partially because I have existing code I
can reuse for a lot of that).

My visceral dislike of Drupal comes from working with it directly for two
years, I read the books, I went through the code, I wrote custom modules, I
learnt CCK/Views inside and out and at the end of it I took a pay cut to not
have to work with Drupal.

My opinion of Drupal can best be summed up with an analogy - given sufficient
thrust even a brick will fly and Drupal required a vast amount of thrust.

Yes out the box you get a great deal of functionality which is what makes it
so enticing but then your needs change and you require doing something that is
outside the scope of Drupal or even existing modules and the whole thing comes
crashing down.

Back when I worked with Drupal it created hundreds of tables for anything
involving slightly complicated CCK/View based workflows, performance was
horrible for logged in users (and trust me I haunted 2bits like a poltergeist
for every tuning opportunity I could find).

But then this is just opinion at the end of the day.

One thing I will say is that the Drupal community are an absolutely lovely
bunch and incredibly helpful which is always a strong plus.

Also just for humour value [http://www.cmscritic.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/08/permissi...](http://www.cmscritic.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/08/permissions.gif) this is not a good UI.

------
majika
The Australian Government CTO's blog post (on finance.gov.au - where else?):
[http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-
industry-c...](http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-
comment-on-govcms-draft-statement-of-requirements/)

The draft Statement of Requirements for GovCMS:
[http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20State...](http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20Statement%20of%20Requirements%20and%20Vendor%20Questions%20%28for%20public%20release%29%20-%205%200.pdf)

Some notable tidbits:

\- No analysis seems to have been done on the approach of hiring their own
developers to develop a custom-yet-cohesive solution, a la Gov.uk.

\- The CTO says "Drupal appears to offer the best enterprise-level as shown by
our previous extensive analysis". Can someone refer me to this extensive
analysis? Have they considered the security risks of standardizing on a single
platform? [http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list.php?vendor_id=1...](http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list.php?vendor_id=1367&product_id=&version_id=&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&month=0&cweid=0&order=3&trc=251&sha=5baca71f3e0155964df6d2b1f631f68053857320)

\- "A solution hosted offshore would not be excluded from consideration" So,
putting Australian Government infrastructure in the US is OK. Subject to US
laws. Fantastic.

\- Does anyone know if the government intends to contribute to Drupal
development? They say that they expect some "feature rich" sites to require
custom modules, but what about Drupal itself?

~~~
XorNot
Sounds about right. The sad thing is the Australian government produces great
in-house software when they do it - but for some reason "outsource it all" has
taken hold all through the place lately.

------
vertex-four
So basically, getting past the people who have no idea what they're talking
about, the Australian Government wants some private company to sell them
something similar to Gov.UK as a hosted service. Is that about right?

------
dwd
> Our preference is for Software-as-a-Service on Public Cloud, using Open
> Source Drupal software.

This is moronic. Why would you mandate using the most unusable CMS system from
an end-user point of view when you are outsourcing the hosting and maintenance
to a SAAS partner? I'm sure they could have cut a better deal with Sitecore
which seems to power a lot of Government sites and is a far more coherent
platform with a robust workflow and integration with Active Directory
services.

------
hvs
First, let me say I'm not a CMS zealot. I've implemented Drupal, Sitecore,
Wordpress[1], and many others. I believe in using the right tool for the job
based on time, price, and capability. That said, Drupal is, without a doubt,
the most complicated, confusing, and counter-intuitive piece of crap I've ever
used and/or implemented. I feel sorry for the users that I've been required to
subject to that monstrosity. Anyone who looks at Drupal and thinks, "Yep,
that's what I need for my site!" should be considered incompetent for whatever
job they have.

[1] Wordpress isn't _really_ a CMS, but it is treated like one at many
corporations.

------
SEJeff
Not sure if anyone realizes this, but Drupal is what powers none other than
whitehouse.gov. They even were kind enough to open source some of their
tooling around Drupal. It is pretty neat stuff.

[https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour](https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour)

[http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-
releases...](http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-releases-
open-source-code)

~~~
mikecb
It's probably the most used among Federal agencies, including top level
departments: [https://groups.drupal.org/government-
sites#USA](https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#USA)

------
etfb
The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an
exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-
example of that.

~~~
jacques_chester
Australian governments exhibit a constant level of stupidity; it's just that
the focus on stupidity is shifted around depending on who is in power.

~~~
girvo
We have a surprisingly nice country, considering our governance over the
years. I'm a bit worried 'bout the current mob, though, they seem determined
to wreck things even more than previous governments. I think I preferred the
previous mob: stabbing themselves in the back distracted them from stuffing
things up!

------
dageshi
Drupal is the Microsoft Excel of CMS, it's sufficiently powerful enough to
store and present data for average users without them having to learn any
programming.

------
BorisMelnik
Hmmm Auusies went with Drupal Germans with Linux I like this recent trend!

------
stockli
I'm always somewhat mystified regarding the abject hatred Drupal gets from the
HN bunch... I understand a few points:

1\. Perceived as overly complex.

2\. Reliant on dev paradigms that originate from the PHP4 days, i.e. no OOP.

3\. Performance can be a problem.

4\. It's PHP, and old-school PHP at that.

5\. Everything is done in the UI, and you can't ship DB-based config in code.

6\. It's for people who don't know how to code. (I would argue this applies
more to WP than Drupal)

I get all of those points, and I agree with most of them. However, my shop
uses Drupal for mid-size projects, and a little bit of WP for small ones.
Here's how I see Drupal:

1\. Integrated, relatively coherent API and model structure that modules can
hook into. I.e. two modules don't need to explicitly know about each other for
them to be used together. Thus, uncoordinated effort on disparate modules can
be used together by site builders to create novel features.

2\. Configuration is much less DB oriented than it was, and many things can be
committed to git now. This is also continuing to improve over time, and Drupal
8 will be a major change in this regard.

3\. Drupal when properly set up actually seems to provide a more consistent
admin experience for users than WP does (in my experience, anyway). WP sites
that use a lot of modules usually end up with the admin feeling like it was
designed by many different people. Drupal used to be that way, but has greatly
improved...

4\. Performance with proper caching is actually pretty good. As always, you
can use any good tool poorly and get poor results.

5\. Drupal's codebase is extremely complex, and structured in a way that makes
things very hard to debug sometimes (i.e. the hook system). Sometimes I want
to do something that I consider very simple, and I can't do it without digging
through the API for 4 hours trying to figure out how to do it.

6\. And yes, PHP has problems. I don't like its API and that it tends to
encourage poor coding practices, but as some recent threads on HN have pointed
out, modern frameworks like Symfony are helping to put a cleaner face on PHP.
And D8 uses Symfony.

It seems like many of those that hate Drupal stopped using it in version 6,
which definitely had many of the problems listed above, many of which have
been addressed to some degree. Drupal 8 is based around Symfony components,
which should greatly modernize the codebase, though that has been a very
controversial move in the community.

All of that said, Drupal still feels like the "least worst thing" for what we
use it for, and I'd love to hear what people use instead of it for the types
of projects we use Drupal for (custom e-commerce, large content sites with
lots of different types of content, complex publishing workflows, etc). We've
tried Joomla and WP at various points, and each felt like it had shortcomings
for our use cases. And we don't usually get to work with huge budgets, so we
have to deliver a lot of complexity for not a lot of $.

Sorry, this got really long, and this thread seems a strange place to go into
so much detail :). But I am genuinely interested in alternatives, and in what
others are using when they just need to build a (complex) site for a customer
who doesn't have the $ to start totally from scratch.

~~~
etfb
My major objections boil down to aesthetics and culture. The themes and
layouts that shipped with Drupal 6 and below were all eye-bleedingly ugly,
really obviously designed by developers with no eye for colour, layout, white
space or typography. In those days, you could tell someone was looking at a
Drupal website just from the sound of them rattling through the cutlery draw
trying to find a spoon so they could gouge their own eyes out. This carried
over to the ridiculously complex menu system and the barely usable
administration methods, which made it actively unpleasant to use the system as
developer OR user.

I gather D7 has improved on this a bit, though it's still nowhere near
Wordpress in this regard.

The main trouble I had with the culture was that complexity was seen as
something necessary for power; as in, you can't achieve a result with a simple
system. You can only chop down a tree with a Swiss Army Knife; an axe is too
simple. This carried over into the disastrous decision to throw out all the
code, including third-party extensions, in every major version update, meaning
that stuff you wrote and tricks you learned for version N would be almost
completely useless for version N+1. I found that idea so totally beyond
hopeless that I was forced to throw out what I had spent years laboriously
learning and move over to Wordpress, which suffers from none of these
problems.

------
fungi
at least its not squiz

~~~
etfb
Amen, brother! Or sister. Or eukaryotic organisms. Whatever.

So what happened to Squiz? It was the godawful piece of shit that I criticised
in the /. post that kinda-sorta lost me my job with AGIMO, so I wouldn't mind
knowing how long it took for me to be proved right.

~~~
dwd
Pretty sure Squiz is still running a number of University sites which was
always their core audience.

~~~
mpettitt
From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The
killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with
WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding
pages to menus such a chore...

------
mark_l_watson
I have never used Drupal (I am not much into Python), but in general it makes
lots of sense for governments to standardize on open source tools, including
CMS.

At least AFAIK, Drupal is fairly efficient. I would not be so enthusiastic
about Wordpress.

~~~
etfb
sniuff is right, Drupal is all PHP, through and through.

As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. The
speed of development for WP is way ahead of that for Drupal, in my experience
at least, to the point where I just refuse to work on Drupal installations and
convert them over to WP as a first step.

~~~
girvo
I worked for a mob that _only_ used Drupal. I'm one of those weirdos that
actually likes modern PHP, but I didn't last long there. In my opinion nearly
anything else is preferable to clicking through that damned GUI to get it to
do what I want without hacking the core or messing with those damned hooks. I
mean, check our changes into git? Why would we want to do that? :<

