As I mentioned in the other thread, I will get with Ryan on updating our Drupal instance.
Cary On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Ross Singer <rossfsin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Shaun, I think you missed my point. > > Our Drupal (and per Tom's reply, Wordpress -- ...and I'm going to take a stab > in the dark and throw MediaWiki instance into the pile) is, for all intents > and purposes, unmaintained because we have no in charge of maintaining it. > Oregon State hosts it, but that's it. > > Every year, every year, somebody proposes we ditch the diebold-o-tron for > "something else" (Drupal modules, mediawiki plugins, OCS, ... and most > recently Easy Chair), yet nobody has ever bothered to do anything besides > send an email of what we should use instead. Because that requires work and > commitment. > > What I'm saying is, we don't have any central organization, and thus we have > no real sustainable way to implement locally hosted services. The Drupal > instance, the diebold-o-tron (and maybe Mediawiki) are legacies from when > several of us ran a shared server in a colocation facility. We had skin in > the game. And then our server got hacked because Drupal was unpatched (which > sucked) and we realized we probably needed to take this a little more > seriously. > > The problem was, though, when we moved to OSU for our hosting, we lost any > power to do anything for ourselves and since we no longer had to (nor could) > maintain anything, all impetus to do so was lost. > > To be clear, when we ran all these services on anvil, that wasn't sustainable > either! We simply don't have the the organization or resources to > effectively run this stuff by ourselves. That's why I'm really not > interested in hearing about some x we can run for y if it's not backed up > with "and my organization which has shown commitment through z will take on > the task of doing all the work on this". > > -Ross. > > On Dec 4, 2012, at 10:41 AM, Shaun Ellis <sha...@princeton.edu> wrote: > >> Tom, can you post the plugin to Code4Lib's github so we can have a crack at >> it? >> >> Ross, I'm not sure how many folks on this list were aware of the Drupal >> upgrade troubles. Regardless, I don't think it's constructive to put new >> ideas on halt until it gets done. Not everyone's a Drupal developer, but >> they could contribute in other ways. >> >> -Shaun >> >> On 12/4/12 10:27 AM, Tom Keays wrote: >>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Ross Singer <rossfsin...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> Seriously, folks, if we can't even figure out how to upgrade our Drupal >>>> instance to a version that was released this decade, we shouldn't be >>>> discussing *new* implementations of *anything* that we have to host >>>> ourselves. >>>> >>> >>> Not being one to waste a perfectly good segue... >>> >>> The Code4Lib Journal runs on WordPress. This was a decision made by the >>> editorial board at the time (2007) and by and large it was a good one. Over >>> time, one of the board members offered his technical expertise to build a >>> few custom plugins that would streamline the workflow for publishing the >>> journal. Out of the "box", WordPress is designed to publish a string of >>> individual articles, but we wanted to publish issues in a more traditional >>> model, with all the issues published at one time and arranged in the issue >>> is a specific order. We could (and have done) all this manually, but having >>> the plugin has been a real boon for us. >>> >>> The Issue Manager plugin that he wrote provided the mechanism for: >>> a) preventing articles from being published prematurely, >>> b) identifying and arranging a set of final (pending) articles into an >>> issue, and >>> c) publishing that issue at the desired time. >>> >>> That person is no longer on the Journal editorial board and upkeep of the >>> plugin has not been maintained since he left. We're now several >>> WordPress releases >>> behind, mainly because we delayed upgrading until we could test if doing so >>> would break the plugins. We have now tested, and it did. I won't bore you >>> with the details, but if we want to continue using the plugin to manage our >>> workflow, we need help. >>> >>> Is there anybody out there with experience writing WordPress plugins that >>> would be willing to work with me to diagnose what has changed in the >>> WordPress codex that is causing the problems and maybe help me understand >>> how to prevent this from happening again with future releases? >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Tom Keays / tomke...@gmail.com >>> >> >> -- >> Shaun D. Ellis >> Digital Library Interface Developer >> Firestone Library, Princeton University >> voice: 609.258.1698 | sha...@princeton.edu -- Cary Gordon The Cherry Hill Company http://chillco.com
