Proposal for the new group web
infrastructure
SFT Group meeting 3/7/2009
Yves Perrin
Outline
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background
what is Drupal
maintenance aspects
proposed production architecture
proposed overall infrastructure
status
conclusion
Background
March 2009: meeting on web requirements
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Inputs:
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Outputs:
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SPI and Geant4 … several technologies, servers, tools
Virtualization … Monkey wiki: authent, RSS feeds but NO fora
Root … DRUPAL content management system (CMS)
SPI proposes to follow up on a Drupal based solution by:
 setting up a 'ROOT like' Drupal instance
 producing a 'work book‘ allowing others to create more instances
Pedrag offers a virtual machine, Carlos set it up
April 2009: starts evaluating customization
May 2009: setting up taxonomy based FAQs
June 2009: several instances on single server
What is Drupal?
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english rendering of dutch word ‘druppel’ (water
droplet
)
originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board
became open source project in 2001
modular Content Management System (CMS)
php + mysql
small personal blogs to large corporate sites
designed to allow third parties additions  Content
Management Framework
‘Drupal core’ + contributed modules and themes
Large community
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500,000 user accounts on Drupal.org
over 2000 people signed up for developer accounts.
last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon
Washington DC 2009, attracted over 1400 people
last European conference, Drupalcon Szeged 2008
had an attendance of 500.
many active Drupal forums, mailing lists and
discussion groups.
over 20 national communities around drupal.org
offering language-specific support.
Site customization via …
Theme Selection (page layout & corporate
look & feel)
Module Selection and configuration e.g:
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Wysiwyg authoring editors
Access Control: Roles and Permissions
Taxonomy (association of nodes with descriptive
terms to organize content)
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sensible URLs and URL aliasing
RSS feeds
… but not suited for
Drupal Modules
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extend the functionality of the drupal core
enabled by the administrator
core modules for:
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RSS Feeds
forums
comments
descriptive URLs
multi-site support
multi-user content creation and editing
security/new release update notification
user profiles
access control (user roles, IP addresses, email)
etc
contributed modules
( several hundreds! )
Drupal Themes
Customize the site look-and-feel
using:
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‘core themes’
‘contributed
themes’
Page authoring
If necessary, PHP code can be entered to
generate the page (e.g. form+handler)
User administration
The site admin registers two users named:
• pedestrian
• savprojadmin
and …
Taxonomy based access
savprojadmin can access both:
‘content for all’
and
‘content for project admin only
Taxonomy based access
pedestrian can access
‘content for all’
but is not shown
‘content for project admin only’
Objectives reminder
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one SFT site
+ one site per SFT hosted project
encourage a common solution
similar (?) look and feel
minimize maintenance efforts
Maintenance
Status Report
Multiple sites architecture
Mysql databases
instance specific
directories for:
single
• settings
• files
• etc
PHP
Drupal codebase
Apache virtual hosts
SFT web
SPI web
Geant4 web
single server
Dual version multiple sites
mysql
prod
dirs
val
dirs
Drupal
Drupal
validation
(production)
new version
Apache
Status
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FCKeditor installed
FAQ installed
taxonomy based access installed
2 instances running
automatic back-ups to be set-up
shibboleth to be installed
instance creation doc to be completed
Drupal validation infrastructure to be
set up
Conclusion
definitely very useful:
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good match with our requirements
potential for site evolution
support from a large community
Usability and documentation can sometime be
confusing but improvement on these issues
has top priority in Drupal 7