Enterprise Drupal @ SF State

Choosing DrupalBegan 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 HistoryPortals 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;

– Portals should be developed iteratively;

– The portal should support “single sign-on”; that is, with a single user id and password each user can access all the applications and data that she or he is allowed to use;

– CSU campuses should consider integration with both legacy systems and CMS (PeopleSoft);

– Courseware management tools should be integrated with the portal;

• From: "http://www.calstate.edu/tis/iam/documents/presentations/2005-simi/SIMI_2005_SF_PresentationFINAL.ppt" and http://its.calstate.edu/systemwide_it_advisory/ITAC_keydocuments/PortalPaper_02012001.doc

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.

• Phase 1 time: 3 months

• Now on Phase 3

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 scriptsBig 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 ModulesAddress 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

SF State Calendar viewer

SFState Library help

SF State News

Student schedule viewer

Utility Modulesconnectioncheck

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-MayShibboleth single-sign on & Google Analytics

• Servers are way underutilized, use about 15% cpu on norm

• Load balance / Auto failover (actually tested)

• No outages yet over 6 mos. (Though some performance issues that required caching content)

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 Public Affairs

• UC Merced: Although not our main site yet. We have 60+ sites live and 40+ sites in development.

• UC Irvine Henry Samuel School of Engineering

• UC Irvine School of Social Ecology

• UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

• UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts

Questions?