website rant

[mrsbrown]

I had a terrible time at the meeting last night.  It was inevitable, but I could have prepared better.

I want the Stormhold website to be moved to a wordpress site (from Drupal), I want the currant admin to change and I'll take the job myself if I have to.

Doing that is fraught, as the current admin has had the job for the past 20 years (at least) and is emotionally attached to the job. 

I did a lot of work with the current admin about 8 years ago, when he was just as attached to the job.  I spent a lot of time and energy carefully making the drupal website look and have the best functionality I could.  It was a place I was happy to send newcomers to and I would regularly check what was going on and I had a person lined up who updated the events pages regularly.  I stopped being Baroness and attending council meetings and then, either  the main server crashed or he updated the version of drupal we were using and he lost the lot and had to rebuild.  Some of the pages I had carefully written and coded could only be retrieved from the wayback machine.

The new version of the website looks dreadful, it's not mobile responsive and the regular event updates are gone.  Also, I no longer have admin access and even if I did, now that I know wordpress I would rather use that.  The current website is too difficult  annoying for anyone to use.

Anyway, after a very confrontational discussion (with no control exercised by the meeting chair) it was agreed that we would prepare a pros and cons paper for the next meeting.  This is a typical approach to solving these sorts of conflicts - put it off until next time.  The problem is, the real problem is the current admin - he needs to go.  Hmmm maybe that's why I can't have a reasonable discussion with him about improving the website experience for the Barony - all of my language and posture show what I really think.

Maybe there's another way?  Can I get the Masonry team to ban drupal from the server?

Goals for the Baronial website:

1. Provide useful meeting and event info for members and newcomers
2. Be a place that gets people to visit regularly
3. Includes enough information for newcomers to be attracted and motivated to come to a meeting/event
4. Can have information added by any of our event stewards
5. Is easily updated by any of our officers
6. Is updated often enough that people don't have to rely on facebook for group information
7. Has a level of automation for event updates - google calendar feed
8. Can be used by local groups to plan their events around ours.
9. Can be used to contact us by the media etc
10. Provides useful resources for members
11. Encourages traffic to our members blogs
12. Looks good enough that people get the impression we know what we're doing

Here's a simple table version of a comparison between drupal, joomla and wordpress.

I'm convinced that drupal is too complicated for us to get a site which works for our weird community based organisation.

Comments

[etfb]

It would appear that the verdict is likely to be that we'll be keeping Drupal, because it's got enough supporters to make it worthwhile, but the strong encouragement to drop it in favour of Wordpress will continue, and we'll try to make sure that as many Drupal sites as possible use a shared multi-site instance instead of maintaining their own. Competent Drupalists will be allowed to carry on, but may be co-opted into the Masonry Team if they're not already. Incompetent ones will, of course, be shot.