SynapseIndia drupal presentation on drupal info

Choosing Drupal
Began with search for WCM for DoIT
Tested many (Plone, OpenCMS, Joomla, etc.)
Settled on Drupal for functionality and a11y
Started w/ 1 virtual server, no real environment
Started with 5.x and moved to 6.x
Campus already had some Drupal exposure

Ancient History
Portals required on CSU campuses
• Project Approach (IBM
Websphere)
– Collaboration between SFSU Team
and IBM Team
– Approach according to the
established IBM Method
• An emerging consensus regarding
portal development includes the
following major best practices and
considerations:
– There should be one AND ONLY ONE
horizontal portal on campus;

What happened previously
• IBM Portal took years to implement base
features. Required constant maintenance
and time-consuming PMRs.
• Other groups/depts. Didn't fully buy-in,
saw IBM WebSphere as a “black box”
• Project Manager/Maintainer left
• Said hey “How about going to Drupal,
they have it running successfully for
WCM, would maybe take a couple
months to switch”

IBM Lotus WCM vs. Drupal
• Java
• JDK/JavaEE/JSR
168/WSRP
• Portlet Factory
• Monolithic
• Broke weekly
• Few expertise
• No community
• Only support is
PMRs
• PHP
• drupal_hook API
• Services module
• Any IDE/Editor
• Core is relatively
small
• Huge community
• Support via
forums, IRC,
Acquia

The A Team
• Me – Architect /
Developer / Themer
• Supakit “superkid”
Kiatrungrit – Developer
• Bora Kou – Systems
Admin
(Part time on this
project)
• Jason D'Silva –
Student Asst. -
Developer (10
hours/week)
• Management position
was actually vacant
during our 2.5 month
sprint. So had a part-
time interim project
manager.

Scrum style agile development
• What we liked:
– Quick
turnaround
– Weekly
feedback
– Clear deadlines
– Daily checkins
– Learning a lot
• What we didn't
like:
– Scope creep
– Loss of
resources
– Cramming at
end
– Not enough
time for
testing/QA
– Working a lot

Demo

[demo] of SF State Drupal Portal
http://inside.sfsu.edu/portal

http://drupal.sfsu.edu/drupal

Architecture
• 2 Dedicated RHEL 5 boxes run Apache (Xeon 2 ghz + 4 GB RAM)
• 2 Dedicated RHEL 5 boxes run MySQL (Xeon 2 ghz + 4 GB RAM)
• 1 Dedicated box runs MySQL cluster mgmt node (+ MMM
replication)
• Load balancer in front + 2 mysql db connection scripts
Big IP Load Balancer
MySQL Cluster 7.x MySQL Cluster 7.x
MySQL
Mgmt Node
MySQL DB
connection test
script
MySQL DB
connection test
script
Apache+PHP 5.2 Apache+PHP 5.2

Drupal & MySQL Cluster :(
Drupal will not run out of the box on ndbcluster tables
Problem: menu_router table and locale_sources tables
A bug was filed with MySQL, rejected because ndbcluster
doesn’t support row lengths of that size
Issues on d.o. filed to address this in core
http://drupal.org/node/391130 and http://drupal.org/node/703916
Split the menu_router table into smaller, more manageable tables
Remove the key reference on locale_sources or change the key
data type to be something other than text/blob
Workaround at http://www.coderintherye.com/

SF State Custom Modules
User Interface Modules
Address change
Benefits pps
Distribution Groups management
Emergency contacts pps
Ethnicity resurvey
Financial Aid Offer Letter
Financialaidofferletter admin
Military status
Name Change Self Service
Nextmuni
Official Transcript Request
Utility Modules
connectioncheck
deletecookies
encryption
langhide
Scheduled message
Show more filter
Shibboleth data mapper
sfsulogout
shibbolethdata
validator
xmlservice

Getting the Campus Community
to Develop

Offered two trainings
– 1) How to install Drupal on your localhost
– 2) How to create Drupal modules
– 3) (Future) How to create web services

Need hand-holding

Monthly meetings
and code workshops

How to get a Module (portlet) into Portal
First content should be discussed with the oversight group
before beginning development to ensure Portal is the
correct place for it
Some departments or groups may have a page in Portal
that they are responsible for and control the content for
All changes must go through the development cycle
including unit and load testing
Security testing of code (Plug for “Cracking Drupal”)
Clean up and review of code

Development cycle
•
Develop code
•
Run unit tests
•
Check into SVN
•
Additional development
•
Interface testing
•
Tag in SVN
•
Verify automated tests
•
User acceptance testing
•
Content is added directly here
•
Management approval
•
Automated tests run
•
If any tests fail, there is no push to
production
•
Automated tests
•
If any tests fail, system is rolled back to
previous build

Prepare
Define requirements including functionality and UI
Remember you are working within the Portal template so many UI elements are
predefined
Define interfaces to backend systems
The most common interfaces are

REST/ WebServices that should follow w3 standards

LDAP (V3)
Determine where portlet will be located and who should have access

Local development
Build portlet
Run unit tests
Unit tests should include all UI components and all backend interfaces
Check into svn
Request dev build

Backend
Work with the data and application owners of the source systems to
build the required backend interfaces
Make sure you follow the defined security model if there is one, or
work with us to define one if the system you are connecting to has no
model defined
Set up web services

Development (DEV)
Run unit tests
Run integration tests, finalize development
Peer review all code
Tag SVN code for test
Request Test build
Code is pulled from SVN into Dev

Test/ Quality Assurance (TEST)
Define test plan and execute all functional tests
Tests must include all functions, UI components, and backend interfaces
Perform user acceptance testing
Perform load/performance testing
Submit automated test suite for Staging and Prod
This test suite must be comprehensive
Make any content only changes directly in Test
A manager must sign off indicating the following:
He/she is aware of all changes going into production and approves them for the
specified date
The automated tests sufficiently cover all functionality
All code has been peer reviewed
The load/performance tests prove that the application meets the minimum requirements
Tag code in SVN for roll out
Code is automatically pulled from TEST at 1am and deployed into staging

Staging
Automated test suite is run
If any tests fail, production roll out is not performed
If all tests pass, promotion to Prod occurs automatically at 6am

Production (PROD)
Automated tests are run
If any tests fail, production is rolled back to previous release

Accessibility

508 compliant

All pages were run through manual checks

Theme is color contrast compliant

Testing out using the accessible_content
module developed at CSUMB

Security

IP based Access for back-end services

Everything is behind a firewall

Everything is behind Shibboleth auth

Core PHP Module is removed

Role based access to pages, panels

Daily log checks (in future, archive logs in
central change mgmt repository)

Grendel-Scan

OWASP standards

Scalability
• We are not very big
Handled ~500 concurrent users without
problem
• Peak ~5,600 visitors/day
• 357,000 visits and 1.7 million page views
from March-May
Shibboleth single-sign on & Google
Analytics
• Servers are way underutilized, use about
15% cpu on norm

Performance
• Initial Build took 7.5+ sec. Load times
• Used Xdebug to find drupal_http_request
was problem. Used cron to cache
• Down to 3.5 sec load times.
• Installed APC via PECL (quite easy)
• (Make sure to give it enough memory)
• Down to ~1.5-2 sec load times.
• Ensure Oracle db connects quit if can't
reach (need to upgrade to 11g)

Where we are Now vs. Where we
want to be

Now campus websites
are fragmented,
outdated

Not all sites use Univ.
Template, and some
don't use it correctly or
update it timely

Depts want to move to
central hosting

We have a monthly
meeting Drupal User
Group

Depts. want to put
sites in centrally
managed highly
available Drupal install
for easily keeping sites
up to date

1 Drupal theme means
a consistently updated
look

Need installation
profile for point & click

Tools to consider
• Aegir (still maturing when we looked at)
• Open Atrium
• Pressflow
• Memcached/Boost
• Cloud hosting via Acquia/AWS or
Rackspace as well as consultants

Drupal is not the solution for
everything (though I love it)

Drupal is not
– our document management system
(though it could be someday) We use
Sharepoint
– our project management system (again
Sharepoint)
– our help desk ticketing sys (remedy, gia)

It can be made to do all these things, but
other products are out there

The Importance of Community

Drupal.org

Bay Area / Berkeley / South Bay DUGs

IRC: #drupal-support or #drupal

On campus: http://drupal.sfsu.edu/drupal

Monthly Drupal meetups (now workshops)

California Higher Education Group:
http://groups.drupal.org/california-highered

California Higher Ed Drupal Sites
• California Institute of the Arts
• CSU Monterey Bay portal (login
required)
• CSU Monterey Bay Catalog
• Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
• San Francisco International Airport
(SFO)
• SF State University Portal (login
required)
• SF State Drupal Sites (login
required)
• Stanford University Sites using
Drupal
• UC Berkeley
Drupal Sites
• UCLA Graduate
Students
Association
• UCLA Semel
Institute
• UCLA Family
Commons
• UCLA School of

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