Are you a savvy Drupal developer or tester? Read on for an opportunity with HU.
BTW, we’re intrigued by the idea of a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. Would a system upgrade qualify? Hypothetically, let’s say we launch a campaign… what would HU community members be open to contributing? What kinds of things would you want in return? What’s a reasonable minimum and maximum contribution? If it’s workable for us, then HU would be the one to initiate it.
Next…
WHAT’S THE FUTURE FOR HU… SOFTWARE-WISE?
Currently we are on vBulletin 3.8, and Drupal 6, and Movable Type 1.4
ALL are “old” and definitely in need of replacement. So it’s a major upgrade to everything – and it won’t be cheap.
vBulletin – The HUBB
vB is NOT worth upgrading. The sad history is that the British developers sold it to an American company, Internet Brands, a few years ago – and the developers didn’t go with it to America, so the American company went their own way with it. The reason they bought it was that they had a large number of “enthusiasts” websites (read Mustang, Corvette etc) and wanted to own the software so they could make it do what they wanted to. Sadly they did a bad job. vB 4 was released, and all the website owners hate it as it’s totally unreliable and causes a lot of grief. Yes there are some sites running it and they’ve had a hard struggle to make it work. And rather than fix it, IB brought out vB 5, which is worse. The general consensus among webmasters is that vB is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet. Security patches etc have theoretically come to an end for 3.x, it’s ancient code, it’s clumsy and doesn’t do phones/tablets WELL – it works ok, but not well, and of course the lack of support and a good upgrade path is the death knell.
Movable Type – HU Blogs /stories
That’s easy, it’s gotta go, it’s ancient and causing trouble with php versions.
Drupal
This runs the bulk of the site, member management, the store, the shipping database and more. We’re on Drupal 6, which in March is dead, as Drupal 8 has just been released and Drupal.org only maintains two versions. Until we move to Drupal 8, we will be paying for software – especially security – updates to ensure the site remains secure.
Drupal is a major Content Management System that is Open Source, so free to use. It’s used by over 100,000 websites, including Gatwick airport, University of Minnesota, Greenpeace, RedHat, Timex, The Economist, BBC store, Fox, Weather.com, Oxfam, El Jazeera, Johnson & Johnson (we like that one
) and many more. Lots of smaller sites run it too, it’s very scalable from small to large, and can grow with the site.
So where does that leave us? We’ve been thinking about it for several years now!
HERE’S THE PLAN FOR THE FUTURE:
ALL of HU on one piece of software, Drupal.
Drupal can do great things for us. The base software is solid, robust, well managed and fully “responsive” meaning it can work on any platform; tablet, phone etc “perfectly” out of the box. It’s also HTML 5, meaning we can do lots of nice stuff with that, lightening the user download thus improving speed. There are over 7,000 modules for it, meaning if someone had a great idea and wanted something, they built it and released it to the Drupal Community – and we can have it for free. If we need something special, there is always a developer that will build anything you want – for a fee of course!
HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET THERE?
1: Drupal 8 isn’t completely ready for prime time – not enough modules are updated to D8 yet that we can use it, especially the forum modules. A simple site can be done and work, but we’re too complex.
2: Migration of over 110,000 pages is a nightmare, and will take a LOT of planning and testing and preparing by a data migration expert. That’s not us. So $$.
We plan to develop a complete Drupal 8 site on our development server (we have two dedicated servers all ours). As modules become available and funds allow, we will move stuff over to it, testing the migration as we go in chunks. The HUBB will be last; it’s by far the biggest and most complicated to reproduce. This gradual movement and testing is relatively safe, and stretches out the costs. A “big bang” upgrade now is way beyond our means. And, Drupal 8 isn’t ready anyway.
This will also enable us to learn D8, and do more of it ourselves, which is important as we can’t afford too much developer time, especially when it comes to the daily maintenance and tweaks and fixes that are a part of running a large website. We will always need a developer for the tricky bits, theming (the “look” including advanced .css) php, apache, mysql etc. but the less the better.
SO, WHEN??
Currently the plan is to start with a dev site in D8 in the next few weeks. We’ll see what we can and can’t do, work out what we need, push the module developers to get a move on with modules we need, and get familiar with it generally. At the same time we will be talking to local developers and planning the migration and strategizing just how we’re going to work through the technical bits.
If we’re lucky and the required modules are ready and we have the funds, it will be 6 months. Our silly busy time starts in June, so anything not done by then won’t be touched by us until end November, although devs can be working on it along the way.
We expect, realistically, that at the worst it will be 12-14 months from now.
So, WHAT WOULD HELP US MOST AT THIS TIME?
1) CALLING SAVVY DRUPAL DEVELOPERS in the HU Community who would like to work on a really exciting and interesting Drupal 8 site that would look great on your CV. Please contact us!
2) CALLING TESTERS! Yes, we’ll need a test team. We had a great one for the last redesign and we’ll be contacting them again, but we can always use more. Again, let me know.
3) Funding – ah yes the hard part.
Do we have enough to do it? Well we hope so – but it’s going to be very difficult, and slow if we have to do most of it ourselves. More would be better! ? But it will still take 6 months minimum to see anything. But it will be very cool! ?
Grant and Susan
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