Migrating a Vignette Website To Drupal:Story of Multnomah County

Bryan HouseSr. Director, Marketing

Acquia

@bryanhouse

Joshua MitchellApplications Manager

Multnomah County

Upcoming Webinars

Thursday February 17th 9am ET / 2pm UTC

– Client Advisor Webinar - Drupal Staging and Deployment Best Practices

Thursday February 24th 9am ET / 2pm UTC

- A Look Under the Hood at Acquia Hosting for Drupal Websites

Thursday February 24th 1pm ET / 6pm UTC

- Building Killer Developer Communities Fast with Drupal Commons

Thursday March 24th 1pm ET / 6pm UTC

- Mobile-izing Your Organization with Drupal

Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars

Upcoming Training Events - February & March 2011http://training.acquia.com/events

February 23-25, Leuven, Belgium

– Drupal Module Development

Throughout February - March in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal Canada

– Drupal in a Day

– Site Building with Drupal

– Theming and Module Development

March 1-3, Geneva, Switzerland

– Drupal in a Day

– Site Building with Drupal

March 7-9, Edinburgh, Scotland

– Drupal in a Day

– Site Building with Drupal

March 21-24, Washington DC

– Drupal in a Day

– Site Building with Drupal

March 29-31, Paris, France

– Drupal in a Day

– Site Building with Drupal

Register for Drupal Training in your area

Training @ DrupalCon:Upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7

Conduct upgrades of sites, identify pitfalls and gotchasLearn methods and best practices for development to ease upgrading to Drupal 7Instructor Team:– Erik Webb - Professional Services, The Inspector – Jacob Singh - Engineer in Drupal Gardens, Mr. Media– Joshua Brauer - Client Advisor, Dr. Deployment

Introduction

Joshua Mitchell–Applications Manager General Government / Open Source –Multnomah County

Migrating fromVignette to Drupal

The Story of Multnomah County

Joshua Mitchell, IT Applications Manager, General Government and Open Source, Multnomah County, Oregon

We started with a simple plan...

Redesign the website

Migrate from Vignette 7.3 to 7.5 in the process

A new CMS was off the table

1 year later

Redesigned look and feel

County Chair Website (redesigned twice)

Homepage and three commissioners

Only three other sites had been migrated

Decision points

Vignette 7.6 released

Multnomah County hires first ever Open Source manager

OpenText buys Vignette

Vignette 8 released

Chance to test out cloud computing

Vignette Costs

Typical year cost is $143,711 in licensing and maintenance

Includes:Per CPU licensingAdapters for MS Office and MS Email/ExchangeRich Text Editor (Extron and later ePhox) Web Log ReportingVignette Portal - a tool for aggregating content into a common "portal" often used for Intranets...and paying for lots complicated licensing language

Vignette Costs (continued)

Full-time Vignette developer

Full-time Java/Vignette contractor

Full-time web designer

Full-time web manager (content and planning)

Two part-time content specialists

Part-time project manager

Part-time trainer

Why we decided to change directions

Not about price... but that didn't hurt

Why we decided to change directions

Usability Adding and editing content was cumbersome.

Why we decided to change directions

Training As the number of launched sites on Vignette grew, we realized that training time was getting out of hand. Continuous requests for ad hoc training or content edits by developers rather than content owners.

Why we decided to change directions

Features Image resizing (custom module $$)Media handling (custom code $$)Document management (additional license $$) Adding these capabilities would have been costly additional licenses from Vignette.

Pilot Project

April 12 - Executive buy in

April 19-21 - DrupalCon San Francisco (Crash Course)

June 21 - Hired Open Source (Drupal) Developer

June 30 - Launched Public Affairs Office and Jobs sites

August 1 - Pilot concludes and is declared a success

Pilot Project Successes

System handles imagesDrupal allows users to upload full size images and associate those images with other content. Upon display, Drupal dynamically resizes, compresses, and generates the image in three different sizes: thumbnail, display and large. These can all be used for several slideshow solutions in the future and additional sizes can be added as needed for instant generation. System handles video and slideshow mediaWe have successfully created a standard way to display YouTube, Flickr and other common media types.

Pilot Project Successes

Can categorize and tag contentThis is base functionality in Drupal. For the pilot site we are using tags and have a dynamically generated tag cloud. System supports friendly URLsPath aliases and global redirect give us friendly web addresses that search engines love. Revision control finally implemented Moved the Drupal code base into an externally hosted subversion account. Includes ability to deploy code up our development stack.

Pilot Project Successes

RSS out of the boxThis is base functionality in Drupal. All of our news and events is automatically published to RSS feeds.

Powerful templatingWe easily matched our look and feel and it is much easier to role new features with a consistent design throughout the site.

SearchStarting with a module that integrates Google Custom Search Engine. We have plans to move to Apache Solr and faceted search.

Pilot Project Successes

Site archive and restorationBackup and Migrate module takes a database snapshot every two hours. Twice a day, we back up all the files on the site to all our development environments and an internal server. Before every code change we snapshot the entire server as a restore point.

Site launches at the touch of a button No developers are harmed in the making of a site. We can now create a new site within seconds. (We used this to our advantage to create a Google Apps training site on the fly in about 2 hours.)

Pilot Project Successes

WebformsOur users can be trained to create their own webforms for collecting data and creating complicated contact forms.

Blogs, comments, public interaction, oh myWhile we've been slow to release new blogs, Drupal gave us the ability to role blog functionality into any new site. (Warning... your government users may not be ready for this.)

Drupal Stack

AWS and Drupal: Two great tastes that go great together

Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) environment with Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Pressflow (optimized version of Drupal)

Special configuration

Varnish for HTTP cachingMemcached for MySQL cachingAPC for PHP caching

Drupal Stack

Elastic IP allows us to hot swap our UAT and Production environments in ~3 seconds.

Estimated load capability of ~20,000 page views per second.

Uptime Comparison

Vignette - Public Websites August 2010 through January 2011

Uptime Comparison

Drupal - Public Websites August 2010 through January 2011

Drupal Costs

No licensing or maintenance costs for our environment

Server costs are slightly less due to Amazon Web Services environment. Use a package repository specifically designed for optimized Drupal build.

Full 3-server AWS stack costs about $500 per month including instance run time and bandwidth usage. Fluctuates based on actual usage.

Hosted subversion is $50 per month.

Drupal Costs (continued)

Full-time Drupal developer

Full-time Java developer retrained to Drupal

Full-time web designer

Full-time web manager (content and planning)

Two part-time content specialists

Part-time project manager

Part-time Drupal trainer

Thank you

The finishing crewArchie (Linux admin)Arun (engineering)Bob (engineering)James (design)Julia (planning)Rachel (content)Sanne (content)Stacey (training)Xingwu (engineering)

Helped along the wayLarry (integration)Mike (integration)

Moved on along the way

Kashif (engineering)Nadya (project mgmt)Lee (training)

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Acquia is Your Enterprise Drupal Guide

[start!]

[ enterprise deployment]

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Start off right with hands-on training

Learn[ ][start!]

[ enterprise deployment]

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Solutions to build great Drupal web experiences

Build[ ]

[start!]

[ enterprise deployment]

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cloud service platforms for rapid, reliable deployments

Deploy[ ]

[start!]

[ enterprise deployment]

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Enterprise 24x7 support from Drupal professionals

Operate[ ]

[start!]

[ enterprise deployment]

© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Acquia Advantage

Training and Education +Professional Services +

Global Partner Community +Drupal Platform as a Service +

Expert Drupal Support +Cloud-based Services +

A Drupal Sure Thing[ ]

Questions

For more information, visit:– http://acquia.com– http://twitter.com/acquia– http://acquia.com/facebook

Contact us:– sales@acquia.com

– 888.9.ACQUIA

Try Drupal 7 today, for free – Sign up at http://drupalgardens.com

Sign up for a free 30-day Acquia Network Trial– http://acquia.com/trial

Recording of today’s event and slideswill be posted at:

http://acquia.com/resources/recorded_webinars