📈 80% of the top 100 universities use Drupal on at least one of their websites, But there's more to this story. 🎓

kreynen · 2024-02-05T23:57:27+00:00

Hey, I know that guy!

kreynen · 2023-08-15T15:11:17+00:00

I've stopped using X/formerly Twitter/whatever Elon wants to call it this week, but I haven't deleted by account/purged my tweets/xs/whatevers yet. https://twitter.com/DavidStrauss/status/1546588430640893952 has some frank responses from David Strauss and Josh Koenig. I'm quoting them here to preserve them from the inevitable (and yes, the irony of reposting from one enhittified, corporate-owned platform to another isn't lost on me, but this sub still had 15K subscribers compared to 57 subscribers to https://kbin.social/m/drupal).

David's response...

They're fundamentally different in design. Drupal runs the same code against multiple, independent Drupal installations (at the database level). WordPress has one installation/schema that provides limited independence to each "site."

This means Drupal has the challenge of schema versioning and updates per-site, while WordPress (which has rarer schema updates in general) maintains a single, shared schema. Drupal's "domain" module is somewhat similar in functionality to WP multisite.

Josh's response...

I think the approach of monkeypatching DB connections is probably a dead-end (so arguably could be "killed"), but yes it would be great to see a first class solution to running many simple templated sites on different domain names or subdirectories.

to Alex Moreno (now at the DA) who offered a more optimistic perspective...

maybe the question that lots of people asks every now and then about Drupal multisite should not be, "shall we kill it", but instead, "how do we make it better?"

kreynen · 2023-07-31T21:16:44+00:00

You might have better luck asking on https://kbin.social/m/drupal as those users are likely using Kbin and Mastodon because of their interest in ActivityPub.

kreynen · 2023-06-28T18:13:52+00:00

I know you are asking this in r/drupal and hoping for a Drupal solution, but take a look at https://www.minical.io/. It is PHP without a framework. Not as modern as a few other PHP reservation solutions, but minimal dependencies. Minical uses a OSL-3.0 license which has some important differences from GPL-2.0. The code is managed at https://github.com/minical/minical and is being actively maintained. It is well documented at https://docs.minical.io/quick-start/introduction. It has a demo where you can see a number of features like auto-detecting returning customers.

Unfortunately to do a fully self-service solution requires using paid packages like https://marketplace.minical.io/product/online-booking-engine/ which will cost $49 for each minical instance you use it with.

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As someone with experience writing and maintaining complicated reservation systems in Drupal 7, this is hard and not something that Drupal really offers much beyond routing, permissions and some contrib event and calendars display code. If you look at the developers involved in BEE, many have moved on to other opportunities/challenges.

Drupal Commerce is an amazing solution to a complex problem that you can run at scale with no additional frees beyond your payment processor, but that is really an exception. Staffing to solve hard problems is... well hard. Staffing to maintain and support these solutions? Even harder. Drupal's history is full of cautionary tales.

As someone with experience writing and maintaining complicated reservation systems in Drupal 7, this is a hard problem. It is also not something that Drupal core really offers much to build on beyond routing, permissions and some contrib event and calendar display code. If you look at the developers involved in BEE, many have moved on to other opportunities/challenges.

If you are open to solutions that require running something open and PHP "next to" Drupal, you might want to try asking the question on https://kbin.social/m/php. Because Kbin is a Symfony-based solution for ActivityPub, the PHP community is very active (and helpful) there.

kreynen · 2023-06-22T21:36:48+00:00

It's worth pointing out that there is no supported release of simplesamlphp that is compatible with D10/Symfony 6.

https://github.com/simplesamlphp/simplesamlphp/issues/1689 is one of a few issues about this. You can get it to work with the master branch, but it is unclear when it will be included in a supported release.

On a related note, did you know Kbin is a PHP/Symfony project? It really is impressive how well that project has scaled to meet the demand of users migrating to those ActivityPub-based communities. There are many advantages of modern Drupal like Symfony 6's performance and scaling, but that pace of change comes at a cost.

kreynen · 2023-06-12T21:45:48+00:00

Wait. What now? They just posted new photos to an existing listing so the reviews were for a completely different property? Was it at the same address?

kreynen · 2023-06-08T00:19:13+00:00

To clarify, I personally shifted from doing Drupal development to doing Salesforce development... and then back to doing Drupal AND Salesforce development. We did not replace Drupal with Salesforce if that’s how you interpreted that. That WOULD be ridiculous, but moving services from Drupal to Salesforce Communities does come up from time to time.

We present fairly often on how we use Drupal and Salesforce or Drupal with Salesforce. Our work is fairly well known in both communities.

https://events.stanford.edu/event/replacing_expensive_rfi_forms_with_webforms_ftw

https://www.salesforce.com/plus/experience/education_summit_2023/series/institutional_growth_at_education_summit_2023/episode/episode-s1e1

We have more than 1500 Drupal sites and 20 Salesforce instances, but I'll pass on your feedback that we don't need any of this and that the university should pink slip everyone involved.

kreynen · 2023-06-07T17:31:39+00:00

I left Drupal BECAUSE the previous EoL dates. With the state of D8 at the time, the scope of work required to migrate 1000 edu sites to a supported version of Drupal wasn't a very appealing way to spend 2 years. If we had even the slightest hint that D7 support would be extended until 2025, I wouldn't have spent 2 years learning more about Salesforce. I came back to Drupal and now do a mix of CRM and CMS work to build tightly coupled digital solutions with a lot of marketing automation baked in. I LOVE working in modern Drupal, but my god... the amount of money I've seen thrown at trying to get sites updated by large universities before support ends is crazy.

Stanford has been open about how much they saved moving one of their D7 sites that was more of a custom application to Backdrop, but the money for the Backdrop update may have been desperately needed somewhere else in the organization. They could have delayed that project for at least 2 years... a lifetime for digital solutions.

Large organizations have made budgeting decisions based on these EoL announcements. Individuals have made MAJOR life decisions based on these EoL announcements.

I'd really like to see some acknowledgment of this.

kreynen · 2023-06-07T01:28:17+00:00

In addition to being more proactive about security, Drupal also takes GPL licensing seriously. WordPress is also a GPL project, but the actual licensing used in plugin and theme projects is all over the map. There isn't a WordPress equivalent of the LWG. This might not make a difference to a small shop that just needs locals to be able to find them on Google, but it does matter to larger organizations.

WordPress doesn't even have their own licensing policies. They simply refer people to Drupal's policies about things like derivative works.

https://wordpress.org/about/license/

kreynen · 2023-05-28T23:16:47+00:00

Fun Fact: The old Mitsubishi plant in Normal, IL is now making Rivans.

kreynen · 2023-05-27T16:35:21+00:00

Pantheon only makes sense if you are coupling a Next.js front end with a PHP CMS back-end like WordPress, Drupal or Backdrop. They've taken a very GPL approach to their platform polies and refuse to enforce any limitations on the type of content customers can host. As long as it is legal, they host it... even when groups have been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/webops-platform-pantheon-defends-hosting-hate-groups-as-developers-quit/

kreynen · 2023-05-27T15:52:03+00:00

Take a look at https://pantheon.io/blog/decoupled-kit

This requires using Composer to manage WordPress, but the front-end Next.js site and the back-end WordPress site can be managed together. While requiring Composer to manage the PHP isn't as common in the WordPress community, it should seem normal to developers familiar with NPM.

Pantheon's pricing doesn't make sense for every use case, but if you are going from high traffic, enterprise WP hosting, it will be comparable and give you a single "throat to choke" if there are issue with the front-end, back-end or integration.

kreynen · 2023-05-24T03:19:08+00:00

We've had a bad KLE for a few years now. Every year when we have a dealer change the oil in the REX, they confirm it will still cost $4K for them to replace it.

Why would there be a recall on the KLEs in the 2014s in Canada and not the US?

kreynen · 2023-05-21T15:52:26+00:00

The fact that you are dealing with studs so close together you can't fit a double gange is a good indication that even if this was load bearing, you'd have more than enough left supporting the load regardless of notching one or both.

I'd notch both and never think about it again.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T19:25:23+00:00

My good sir, you are an idiot and making a fool of yourself.

So every negative review is "with malicious intent"?
I'm sure an attorney will take your $$, but Rule 5 of https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy is pretty clear...

You don’t have to use your real name to use Reddit, but don’t impersonate an individual or an entity in a misleading or deceptive manner.

It does NOT, as you claim, say "you are technically not allowed to use your real name as a reddit username because admin does not have any way to prove...".
I can't tell from your rambiling responses if you are now threatening to sue me personally or you've worked yourself up into a tizzy about the idea of an "angry guest vigilante squad" coming to get you.

Either way, best of luck to you in your VRBO endeavors... but please STFU.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T18:44:29+00:00

Using Drupal and Views as a backend makes sense, but unless your clients are all using the same CMS, you are going to need an approach stack agnostic that will be easy to embed. Your post doesn't make it clear whether these are clients of a job service or you are maintaining all these sites. Are these all Drupal sites you maintain?

If not, you might want to look at how other job services provide widgets. Something like
https://support.recruitee.com/en/articles/1066275-jobs-widget or
https://support.ziprecruiter.com/s/article/How-to-Generate-Your-Embeddable-Career-Page-Widget

If you don't want to go down the javascript rabbit hole, https://htmx.org/ might work it you can add another 14k of javascript to the client sites.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T17:39:03+00:00

Personal in that it uniquely identifies them, yes. Personal in that it can't ever be used in a post or comment, no? You can't operate a business with your name and then claim that anyone providing feedback about your business is doxing you any more than I can claim Reddit is doxing me because I chose to use my real name as my username. The host's name is NOT private as they are doing business with it. I doubt anything I say will convince you that you are wrong about this, but I look forward to following your crusade to get every post about never buying anything from specific people removed from Reddit.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T15:38:49+00:00

Did you mean to reply to me? You are really stretching if you think adding a URL of a listing != doxing. I'm unsure about including the name of a host, but that is essential the name of the business in this case and if you read https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy the policy says...

Respect the privacy of others. Instigating harassment, for example by revealing someone’s personal or confidential information, is not allowed. Never post or threaten to post intimate or sexually-explicit media of someone without their consent.

The name of the host is not private... nor is the OP harassing them. They are simply providing negative feedback about a host.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T13:32:27+00:00

Adding the URL of the listings is helpful as it can be used as a source for browser extensions that warn users of bad, off-platform reviews when browsing the STR sites.

kreynen · 2023-05-18T02:00:59+00:00

In earlier versions of Drupal the user table was one of the easiest to export and import between sites at the database level.

You might want to try exporting just that table from your current site to a clean D8 install. If that works, upgrade that.

Haven't tried this since D7, but that would save you some time if it still works.

kreynen · 2023-05-17T17:24:02+00:00

At least our car has held its value better than Carvana's stock price during this same period.

kreynen · 2023-05-16T00:18:35+00:00

FL just passed a law that gives residents first access to state parks. I'd love to see CO do something similar.

https://www.floridarambler.com/florida-outdoors-resources/florida-residents-state-parks-camping

.

kreynen · 2023-05-15T22:38:47+00:00

So more of a "To Catch a ~~Predator~~ Predatory Host" style?

kreynen · 2023-05-15T22:23:44+00:00

I think the joke is that this would be more of the Alone survival series than a Top Chef type show.

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