Migrating a Vignette Website to Drupal: Story of Multnomah County
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Migrating a Vignette Website To Drupal: Story of Multnomah County Bryan House Sr. Director, Marketing Acquia @bryanhouse Joshua Mitchell Applications Manager Multnomah County
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The thought of migrating your website to a modern CMS like Drupal might seem intimidating, however in most cases the benefits will far outweigh the challenges. That's what the team at Multnomah County realized. During a site-wide redesign, they were faced with decision of upgrading their 61 Vignette sites from version 7.3 to 7.5 or choosing an alternate solution like Drupal. After spending months slowly upgrading a few sites at a time, spending thousands of dollars, and in the end not gaining the functionality they needed - it was time for a change. In this presentation, Acquia and our guest speaker - Joshua Mitchell, Applications Manager General Government/Open Source from Multnomah County - discuss how he and his team successfully turned around their website redesign project. Drupal not only sped the process of launching and maintaining new sites, but also allowed them to move their hosting infrastructure to the cloud, significantly reducing long term costs. This session will cover: * Requirements included in the evaluation process * Key factors considered when choosing Drupal * Lessons learned by the Multnomah County team
Transcript of Migrating a Vignette Website to Drupal: Story of Multnomah County
Migrating a Vignette Website To Drupal:Story of Multnomah County
Bryan HouseSr. Director, Marketing
Acquia
@bryanhouse
Joshua MitchellApplications Manager
Multnomah County
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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)
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