Enterprise Drupal @ SF State

1. Enterprise Drupal @ SF State Campus: San Francisco State University 1600 Holloway Ave.San Francisco, CA 94132http://www.sfsu.edu Presented By: Kevin O'Brien w/ Supakit KiatrungritDivision of Information Technology San Francisco State University nowarninglabel on drupal.org http://www.coderintherye.com Greetings Drupal Ninjas

2. 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

3. 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; 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

4. 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”

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. 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 DB connection test script Apache+PHP 5.2 Apache+PHP 5.2 MySQL DB connection test script MySQL Cluster 7.x MySQL Cluster 7.x MySQL Mgmt Node

10. 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/

11. 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 SF State Calendar viewer SFState Library help SF State News Student schedule viewer Utility Modules connectioncheck deletecookies encryption langhide Scheduled message Show more filter Shibboleth data mapper sfsulogout shibbolethdata validator xmlservice

12. 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 meetingsand code workshops

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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)

25. 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)

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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

30. 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

31. Questions? Contact: kobrien@sfsu.edu @nowarninglabel on twitter or on d.o. http://www.coderintherye.com