Sarah Durham (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to today’s webinar. I am Sarah Durham, and I am going to briefly introduce my colleagues. They will talk a little bit more in a minute and also we’d love you to introduce yourself as people start to arrive. If you are comfortable doing so, you’ll see a chat panel. And if you could chat in to us your name, the name of your organization, your pronouns, and where you are, where you are geographically, so who you are and where you are, would be great. Theresa, you want to say hi.
Theresa Gutierrez Jacobs (00:50):
Hi, I’m Theresa Gutierrez Jacobs. I am a project manager at Advomatic. And for today, I’m going to just quickly chat my email. If you have any, I don’t know, tech issues or questions or anything like that, that is more tech related to this webinar. Feel free to reach out to me via my email. Otherwise, you can always chat or ask questions, particularly for this webinar here. And Dave, you want to say a quick hi, before we get rolling.
Dave Hansen-Lange (01:18):
Hello. I’m Dave Hansen-Lange and where I am, I’m about an hour from Toronto. I’m the director of technical strategy at Advomatic. I’ve been with Advomatic for about 13 years. And I’ve been doing work with nonprofits in the web for maybe about 15 or 17 years.
Sarah Durham (01:42):
Okay. So we’ve got a bunch of people who are already with us, a few more people who might join us in the next couple of minutes, but just to keep the ball rolling and use your time thoughtfully, we’re going to dig into our content for today. And as I said a little bit earlier, I will reintroduce myself. I’m Sarah Durham, I’m the CEO of Advomatic and also Advomatic sister agency, Big Duck. Some of you may have noticed that the Zoom we’re using today is a Big Duck/Advomatic shared Zoom. So if you’re wondering what the connection is, there’s some common leadership across both companies. For those of you who might know Big Duck, but don’t know Advomatic, Advomatic builds sturdy sites that support change. We build, and we support websites in Drupal and in WordPress. And Advomatic has been around now for, I think almost 15 years, although it’s partnership and collaboration with Big Duck and my coming into the company is relatively new.
Sarah Durham (02:43):
It’s about, I’ve been in it about two years. And so Dave is going to really take us through our topic today. And Dave, you could advance to your next slide, if you would like, which is this, what should you do with your Drupal 7 website? So Dave’s gonna talk us through why this is an issue and a few other things in a minute. What I am going to do throughout this conversation is I am going to be monitoring both the chat that you can see in the bottom of your screen, a little button that says chat. And if you click on that, you have the ability to either chat privately to the panelists. So if you want to ask a question confidentially, or you don’t want everybody who’s here to see it, just chat to the panelists and only Dave and Theresa and I will see it.
Sarah Durham (03:26):
If you want to chat to everybody and share who you are, like shout out to Rick, who’s already done that. He’s from the National Council of Nonprofits and he’s in the DC area. If you want to share your information with the panelists or to everybody, you can chat to all attendees. Also, you have the ability to specifically ask questions. There’s a Q&A feature in Zoom Webinar. And that will give me the ability to keep an eye on your questions. And some of them I can type back to you and others will be addressed verbally. So throughout the presentation, I’ll be monitoring all of that and we will address your questions perhaps as we go on, certainly at the end if it doesn’t make sense to do so in the webinar. So don’t hesitate to chat, don’t hesitate to ask questions. We are recording today’s session and Theresa will be sending out an email with a link to that recording and the transcript and the resources we’re mentioning later this week or early next week. So you will have all of this and you can share it with any colleagues if that is useful. So with that, we are going to get rolling over to you, Dave, and thanks, Theresa.
Dave Hansen-Lange (04:44):
Okay. Thank you, Sarah. All right. So to kick things off before we get into the details of all the different things that you can do with your website and what might be best for you I thought we should start with some backstory about like, why we’re at this spot and like, what does end of life even mean? Like, it’s software, how can software… and it really all comes down to security. And just to explain a little bit about how security in Drupal works, there is the Drupal security team, and that’s a team of about a dozen people all across the world. And then there’s a group of people even wider than that who contribute things to the team and say, Oh, this could be a problem. We should look into this. And people on the security team, you know, a lot of their time is paid for by their employers or their clients, but a lot of their time they’re just volunteering for free.
Dave Hansen-Lange (05:50):
And you know, there’s a lot of commitment there. Like, they have weeks on call and stuff like that, because security is very important to the Drupal community. And so we don’t want to have those people working forever for free. So the Drupal community at large has decided, okay, thank you for your time of service, people on the Drupal security team, we will let you go after this date. Some of those people work on AAA too. But people are generally committed for like Drupal 7. And so the original date for the end of Drupal 7 was going to be November, 2021. But then COVID happened and the Drupal community decided, okay, there’s this extenuating circumstance. We’ll give everybody one more year to figure out what they’re going to do. So now that the end of life date for Drupal 7 is November 2022, two years from now.
Dave Hansen-Lange (06:56):
Drupal 8, just as an aside, it’s not really what we’re talking about today. Drupal 8, the end of life is November 2021, a year from now. That’s not what we’re talking about today. And thankfully, if you do have any AAA sites, the situation is a lot simpler. And if you want to get into that a little bit more possibly we could at the end of the presentation. Okay. So today we are going to first cover: these are the options that you have in dealing with your Drupal 7 websites. Then we’re going to look at some example scenarios. And by that, I mean like, okay, here’s an organization, they have a website like this, and because of that, they might consider scenario x. And then I’m going to pass things over to Sarah. And Sarah is going to dive into more of the organizational things, like, how do you plan for this and how do you work with this within your organization? All right.
Sarah Durham (08:15):
Hang on one second, Dave, before we dig into this, I also just want to remind everybody feel free to chat in questions and comments as you go, and we’re going to take pauses in between each of these sections. So if you have, as Dave goes through the options, if you have a specific question about one of the options, and it seems like it’s universal to some of the other people who are participating today, I’ll probably pop in and ask that otherwise we’ll save Q&A for the end. Alright, sorry for the interruption.
Dave Hansen-Lange (08:41):
No, no, all good. I’m also going to be muting every now and then to take a sip of tea. I’ve got a sore throat. It’s not, COVID, it’s just a cold. And yeah, so I’ll be pausing too, as I go. Okay. So what are your options? So I’ve grouped these into four main options, and these are listed in terms of most expensive, to least expensive, most expensive option being start from scratch and build a new website for most people with a Drupal 7 website your main options are move to Drupal 9 or create something in WordPress. There’s some other options that you might consider, but those are the two that are applicable to most people. Option B is upgrade to Drupal 9 and immediately you’re probably thinking what is upgrading to Drupal 9? How is that different from building a website and Drupal 8? And I’ll explain that when we get there, another option is to switch to something called Backdrop. Many of you have probably never heard of Backdrop. And so I’ll start us out by what exactly that means. Or you could just stay on Drupal 7. And even though it has end of life, that there still are ways to keep going on, on your Drupal 7 website.
Dave Hansen-Lange (10:15):
So moving to a new website like I mentioned the main options for most people are Drupal 9 or WordPress. And so just by saying those two names in the same sentence, we immediately get into the topic of like what’s better Drupal or WordPress and what is right for me? I will touch on this a little bit now, and sort of back up a little bit and say that for starters, it’s really hard to make an unbiased and fair assessment of the two. But in a general sense, Drupal 9 is really great for people that, or on websites and organizations that want to do something a little bit more complicated, a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more technological, with more moving parts. And WordPress is generally more applicable to the organizations whose website, in many ways might be similar to other websites. And yeah, that is a little bit vague. I don’t want to dive too deeply into this topic right now.
Dave Hansen-Lange (11:54):
If you want, we can come back to this in the Q&A at the end. And we also have another webinar that we did a couple months ago on this topic more generally. And if you’re just, if you can, we can send along a link to that as well. One last thing on this, though, I will say that when most people compare Drupal and WordPress, they’re not really comparing Drupal and WordPress, they’re comparing the website that someone built for them in Drupal or the website that someone built for them in WordPress. And because of that, they’re often comparing the skills of those people who built the website and not necessarily the underlying technology. And that’s part of the reason why this is such a sticky, thorny issue with a lot of people being on one side or the other there about moving to a new website. You don’t have to do the whole entire thing. You can find ways to do this in bits and pieces. I’ll show some examples of that later, but we’re at this point of rethinking what should we generally do with our Drupal website. It’s a great time to think, okay, this section, do we need it anymore? Should it be here? Is there a better way to do this then when we created this website however many years ago?
Dave Hansen-Lange (13:30):
Since many of you may not have seen modern Drupal I’m going to show you, or we’re pressed, I’m going to show you some slides here. So on the left, what we see is I am editing a page on a website and I want to add a new component which is a common term that we use these days, a new component to the page. I can browse through this library of available components and then add one.
Dave Hansen-Lange (14:00):
Or how it’s going to appear on the page. There’s many ways to do this in Drupal. Drupal is kind of known for having many ways to solve a problem. What we see in this screenshot is a tool called paragraphs. That’s a tool that we’ve been using for this problem pretty successfully on several websites. There’s other tools within Drupal 9. You may have heard the term layout builder and there was a couple of smaller ones as well on the right side. We see the administrative listing of all the content on your website for each site, it’s going to be a little bit different, what you decide to list here. But this is just one example of how it looks and comparing this to WordPress on the left. This is also how WordPress looks when you want to add a new component to the page. And so the right column there, we see, the available components that you have, again, on the right, a screenshot that’s WordPress of a list of all the content on the website.
Dave Hansen-Lange (15:20):
Looking at these two sets of screenshots, there’s a couple things that might sort of immediately come to mind. WordPress, the administrative interface generally looks a little bit more polished.
Dave Hansen-Lange (15:39):
In some ways WordPress can be a little bit all over the place in that each plugin or each new thing that you add to your website tends to design things its own way and do its thing its own way and it’s WordPress. Compared to Drupal, each new thing works in a very consistent manner. So it’s easy to move around from section to section on the website. All that to say is really either is probably a big step forward from where you are with your Drupal 7 website.
Dave Hansen-Lange (16:18):
All right, so which Drupal 7 website is this going to be most applicable to, or maybe you shouldn’t at all consider this option? If you are really frustrated with any part of your website, be that like how the content of this is organized, or just the general backend experience the design of the website, if there’s anything about it that you’d just want to just toss and start again fresh, this is a good option to consider. But like I mentioned, when I listed these four main options, creating a new website is going to be the most expensive of the options. And in the age of COVID, many of you are probably dealing with some tight budgets. So one of the other options may be the better choice. Also, this might not be a good choice for you if your existing site is very complex. And one way to think about this is like you built your website so many years ago, let’s say it was five years ago. And you put all this work into doing that initial build, but then over those five years, you’ve also put in some work, to make the website more and more better. And in this new version of the website that you’re gonna create, you want to encompass all of that.
Dave Hansen-Lange (17:52):
It’s going to be a pretty big project. And so it’s just one way to consider looking at your options.
Okay. Option B, I don’t have a handsome, single flat you can upgrade to Drupal net. So how is this different from just creating a new websiteIn AAA? Drupal 9 has these built-in tools that can take your Drupal 7 website and take all those, all that content, all the content structure all the menus, everything that’s stored in the backend of the website and upgrade it and make it work in a new Drupal 9 website. But what you don’t get is any of the, how that content is presented to visitors, all of that stuff. If you go through this upgrade process, you still need to come up with or you still need to rebuild the way that it’s presented to visitors. Maybe, maybe you’re happy with the design of your Drupal 7 website. And so you can just redo that same design in Drupal 9 or another option since we’re here and we’re creating a new website and Drupal 9, you might want to take advantage of that and do a new design.
Dave Hansen-Lange (19:31):
And so, because of all those things, it’s going to be still a big chunk of work, not as big as just doing a clean slate and starting from scratch. But still a lot of work involved. One thing you do need to look into before you get too far down this road is like, are there any ways in which we solve the problem in Drupal 7, that just there’s no equivalent in Drupal 9. And that has sometimes happened because the Drupal 7 way of solving a problem, one example would be locations. Let’s say you got a content type in Drupal 7 called offices of your organization and they’re storing their address and location. That’s almost certainly done in a very different way in Drupal 9. And there isn’t a way to directly go from one to the other, at least not directly in the same sense of this upgrade process that I talked about before. There may be these situations like that, and you’ll have to do something custom or something else. That’s a little bit more complicated. It’s just important that, you know, these things happen upfront before you get into moving down this road.
Dave Hansen-Lange (21:00):
So who is this good for? I mentioned, you’re going to get the same stuff in the backend as you have now. So it’s, if you’re happy with that, great, consider this option. I mentioned that the visual presentation, you’ve got to redo that. So if you want a fresh design, this might be an option for you. Again, avoid if budget is tight, like I mentioned, it’s still a fairly complicated procedure. All right. A third option is to switch to Backdrop.
Dave Hansen-Lange (21:39):
So Backdrop, I said earlier that your main options are WordPress or Drupal. What’s this, what’s this new Backdrop thing? Backdrop is kind of like a different flavor of Drupal. And in the technical parlance, Backdrop is a fork of Drupal 7. And what does cutlery have to do with software? Absolutely nothing. So by fork, we mean fork in the road. You may know that Drupal and WordPress are open-source software. And that means that anybody, anybody really who has the time available to do it, can jump into the project. You got a problem with the way something works, you want to make it better, you can just do that and you can contribute something and get it rolled into the software. But what that also means is that if you don’t like how something works, you can just take it, copy it, and roll with it.
Dave Hansen-Lange (22:42):
And that’s what’s happened with, with Backdrop so well. Drupal 8 was being developed. There were many people in the community who thought, “Oh, no, like Drupal 8 is looking great and all, but it’s going to be really hard for websites that are on Drupal 7 to get to Drupal 8 and whatever it comes in the future. And they were right. That’s, that’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re having this webinar. And so what they did was they took Drupal 7, copied it, called it Backdrop and started to evolve it and evolve it in some of the same ways that AAA has evolved only keeping with the Drupal 7 way of doing things and the Drupal 7 styles. And so you have an option to take your website and sort of just take that fork in the road and start moving down the Backdrop trail.
Dave Hansen-Lange (23:42):
What this is going to look like for your website is that you’re still gonna have the existing content structure things in the backend of the website, just like that, upgrading to Drupal 9 option. It’s all going to look very similar, if not identical, but different from that upgrade to Drupal 9 option. You can still keep the visitor-facing portion of the website. If it’s going to need a little bit of tweaking to get onto that Backdrop fork in the road. But that is going to be relatively much smaller, a much lighter lift. Not to say that you must keep your existing design, you can make some changes and revisions. You might even consider doing a full redesign. But yeah, you don’t have to, as you’ve heard me describe this, you may be thinking fundamentally that the steps involved, it’s pretty similar to the upgrade to Drupal 9.
Dave Hansen-Lange (25:00):
It is, but still, it is almost certainly cheaper than upgrading to Drupal 9. And mainly the reason is because like I mentioned, it is just Drupal 7 evolved. So the changes that you have to make to your existing website are just immensely smaller, some increased risk. So what I mean by this well, like anybody who works with websites for a nonprofit is probably going to know WordPress, and probably getting to know the word Drupal, probably not going to know the word Backdrop, because it is such a much smaller community. Where there might be that there’s about half a million Drupal websites out there. There may be like a few thousand Backdrop websites out there. And because of that, there’s enough momentum in the community that we know that Backdrop will be here for two years, maybe four years, but it’s harder to sort of see deeper into the future. Whereas Drupal, you know, half a million websites. We know it’s, there’s a lot of people working on this, a lot of organizations, big and small, it’s going to be here for probably at least another 10 years, if not longer. Backdrop, much smaller community. There’s just not as much certainty about the future.
Dave Hansen-Lange (26:44):
But with that said, Backdrop has committed to like the same sort of upgrade structure that Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 have committed to being. We’re not going to do a huge change again in the future. We’re going to make all these incremental changes that will make it much easier for you to stay up to date and evolve your website over time.
Dave Hansen-Lange (27:12):
Great. I thought it important to show some visuals about what Backdrop looks like and looking at these, you might be thinking, “Oh, this looks pretty similar to my Drupal 7 website, but the colors and fonts are more contemporary”. And you are a hundred percent correct in thinking that like I mentioned, it really is Drupal 7 evolved. But there is more to it. There are some easier things on the technical side of how to work with Backdrop compared to Drupal 7. There’s some different ways of managing page layouts. There’s other new features in Backdrop that Drupal 7 doesn’t have. But the thing is, if you take this sort of upgrade from Drupal 7 to backdrop trajectory, you’re not going to get those things all of a sudden. If you want to take advantage of Backdrop’s fancier ways of laying out content on a page then you’re going to have to have a small project to enable that feature. At first, you’re still going to be working in the same paradigms as you are with Drupal 7. So who is Backdrop great for? Anyone who has a lot of custom code. I was talking earlier about like, why you might want to avoid building a new website and Drupal 9 is if you’ve got a lot of custom stuff. Here in this option, and this would be a good option for you because all that custom stuff probably doesn’t need to change very much, probably needs to change a little. But if it’s not going to be all that significant, this is a good option for you.
Dave Hansen-Lange (29:16):
If you are happy with your existing design that’s going to need a little bit of touch-ups to move to Backdrop. I was trying to be consistent here and come up with a reason why you should avoid Backdrop. I couldn’t really come up with one. I think everyone should at least consider this option. It’s kind of like the middle of the road option. You might not choose this option if you’re wanting to do a full redesign, but if all the rest of the things line up for you, then you could do a full redesign in Backdrop. It would be fine. I guess the only reason that I can think of now is that if you are super concerned about keeping the website that you have the same fundamentally as it is now, four, five years into the future, 7 years into the future—because the future is a little less defined for Backdrop—you may want to avoid it in that case.
Dave Hansen-Lange (30:35):
All right. And the last option stay on Drupal 7. I mentioned even though Drupal 7 has reached end of life, there are ways to continue on with it. If you had any websites that were on Drupal 6 and you were in this sort of situation for Drupal 6’s website, when it reached its end of life, there was a program started called the extended support for Drupal 6. This Drupal 7 version of that program is fundamentally identical. And what this is is that I mentioned that many of the security team are volunteering their time. And so this program gets around by trying to force people to volunteer their time by saying it’s a paid program. The Drupal community has vetted several Drupal agencies to offer this extended support service. And what that means is that as security issues come up, maybe there’s a security issue that comes up in Drupal 8 that might also apply to Drupal 7 this, this team of extended support people work on fixing that problem in Drupal 7.
Dave Hansen-Lange (32:11):
And so there’s kind of two ways to take advantage of this: Number one, you sign up with one of the extended support vendors. You’ll be able to find that list through some links that we’re going to send at the end. One of the mandates of this is that they release all of their fixes publicly. It’s happened for Drupal 6 as well. And so if you are technically savvy or you’ve got someone at your disposal who’s technically savvy and can sort out the details and apply these fixes as they come up, this could be a good option for you, too.
Dave Hansen-Lange (33:08):
I think it’s important though, to like, take a step back at this point and talk about why you might think about security in different ways. And one way to think about security is kind of like two groups of websites on the internet—those who security is really important for, for whatever reason. Maybe they’re doing something that some people find controversial and they have people who are trying to hack into their website. Maybe you are processing credit cards on your website and you, you know, someone might want to try and break in and steal those credit cards. Maybe you are a news outlet and you get hundreds or hundreds of thousands of people viewing your content every day. And if someone could break in and get some sort of message out to those people, that might be an incentive as well. So that’s like one group of websites, people who have some sort of special security concern. And then there’s kind of everybody else—everybody who knows that security is fundamentally important, but it’s not more important than it is for everyone else in this group.
Dave Hansen-Lange (34:33):
It’s just the nature of how I described that most organizations are going to be in this group where security is important, but not more important than anyone else. Some are going to be in this heightened group of security. And for those people, they need to think about things more than just like, am I getting the bare necessity basics? Or am I really doing all that I’m responsible for ensuring the security is as good as it can be. And for those people, this may not be the best option in that you’re not on the most recent and currently secure thing you were on, this thing that’s on extended support. And whether that rationale is purely technical, or if it’s purely optics in that if something were to ever happen to your website and it was discovered, “Oh, they’re running this version of Drupal that was created 10 years ago”.
Dave Hansen-Lange (35:38):
How can that be responsible? And then there’s all sorts of politics involved. I mean, it’s a situation you want to completely avoid, but for those of us who are in the group of security as important, but not more important than anyone else, this can be a very reasonable option to consider. So stay on Drupal 7, if you have a really tight budget. And I admit that budget is in the eye of the beholder. For some of you a roomy budget would be a tight budget and vice versa. Like I was talking about, if you don’t have any special security requirements avoid, if your site needs a facelift or if you’re frustrated with the backend. So like I mentioned, this is keeping the same website and keeping it the same. And so if you want to rip something out and try again, this is probably not the option for you.
Sarah Durham (36:56):
Okay. So, Dave, I’m just going to jump in here for a second before we continue with your sample scenarios. We’ve got about 20 minutes left in our time together, so we’re going to need to move pretty quickly through our sample scenarios and through the make a plan section. But we did get a really good question that I’d love you to try to answer for us before we continue on. It’s from our friend, Rita, and Rita asks, if you choose to migrate or upgrade to Backdrop, what would that mean for your future options to upgrade to Drupal 9?
Dave Hansen-Lange (37:29):
I don’t think it really changes the landscape for that at all. Whether you’re upgrading from Drupal 7 or from Backdrop, it’s fundamentally the same thing. It is technically almost identical and that’s because well, Backdrop has gone on this new trail at a foundational level. The way the content is stored, it’s fundamentally the same. And so if you want to pull that content out of either version of those websites into a new Drupal 9 website, it’s going to be the same process. That could change though, as it’s a fork in the road. So Backdrop could go further one way, while well, Drupal 7 is not moving anywhere at this point, but it could continue to move on in a way that’s more different from Drupal 7. But in my opinion, it’s unlikely to change all that much for the foreseeable year or two.
Sarah Durham (38:37):
Okay, great. So, so back over to you.
Dave Hansen-Lange (38:40):
Okay. So like I mentioned, those options, they were great in theory, but now let’s try and put some of this to practice. I’m going to show, I think, four, maybe five example websites and what is unique or different about those websites and why they might choose one option over the other. As you’re looking through this, you might think, “Oh, that’s nothing like my website”. But I’m going to try and pull some things out here that hopefully are going to apply or at least show some things that you should consider. And you also might recognize some of these websites. Don’t focus on that. We’re going to focus on what is it about these websites? I’m also not going to tell you anything about these websites that isn’t something… Sorry, everything that I’m going to tell you about these websites is something that you could just go to the website, look at and figure out for yourself.
Dave Hansen-Lange (39:45):
So there’s not going to be any sort of like private information here that I’m gonna show either. So in this first example, we’re going to look at the ACLU. On the left here, we see what their website homepage used to look like. On the right side, we’re going to see what the homepage looks like now. And the prior version of the website, that was Drupal 7. The homepage, and I say that specifically, the homepage, is now WordPress. You may remember back when I talked about the option of creating a new website that you don’t have to do the whole thing. Here’s just the homepage. And they’ve actually done the same thing with the blog section. It used to be Drupal on the left. Now it’s WordPress on the right. You don’t have to do with everything.
Dave Hansen-Lange (40:44):
So this is an example of a case on the ACLU website. And like, this is just one really long page here that is cut up into three pieces. See at the top, this is all just fairly straightforward content. But then in this section, things start to get more complicated. Like there’s all these other bits of content elsewhere on the website that are related to this case. That’s something that you can do in WordPress, but the more complicated those relationships get, the more awkward it gets to do in WordPress. Then down here at the bottom of the page, things get super complicated. Visually it doesn’t look too bad, but that’s because I think the design was done well. There’s hundreds of legal documents that relate to this case, all in these groupings and hierarchy and get super complicated. WordPress is not the best tool for this kind of job. And so this part of the website is still on Drupal. It’s still going to be on Drupal for now. It might evolve in the future, but that’s where it is for now.
Dave Hansen-Lange (42:03):
Another section of the website, there is this sort of intermediary thing where you could show an action within like an article or a blog post or something to say, “Okay, come take this action”. And during the redesign or in moving bits to WordPress, you know, if you’ve stepped back and thought, is this useful? Is this complicated? Is there a way to do this simpler? And this sort of intermediary thing was just checked and now there’s just links to actions and there’s other ways to show actions without this complicated section of the website. Please consider for your website: What should I get rid of? There’s almost always something.
Dave Hansen-Lange (43:11):
Looking at a different organization, here is one that’s a Drupal 7 website. But you might be thinking, “Oh, this design, it looks fairly current”. And you’d be correct because this organization went through a redesign, I want to say, like, two years ago. And so because of that, looking at those four main options, they can probably throw the create-a-new-website option out because the design still looks great. As long as they’re happy with how the content works on the backend, they could really choose any of the other three options. And, yeah, so consider that.
Dave Hansen-Lange (43:47):
Next, we have a municipality. When I was talking about the option of staying on Drupal 7, that’s maybe not the best option for a municipality in the news all the time. We hear stories of like such-and-such municipality, their website has been hacked, or their computer systems have been taken over by ransomware. And so just the optics of staying on Drupal 7 might not be the best choice for them. The design looks, doesn’t look as fresh as those first two options that we showed. But let me guess a municipality kind of has different requirements in that the number one goal is not a flashy design, it’s getting information out to its residents.
Dave Hansen-Lange (44:32):
And so there may be a way for them to choose one of the non-design related options. And at the same time, maybe consider how it can do any sort of restructuring to better present the information that people need to find. Here’s another organization. In looking at the screenshot, you might be thinking the same things that this organization thinks about this website and that the design is very text-heavy, and it is not quite as engaging as they would really like it to be. And so for this organization, one of the first two options is probably the best choice: creating a new website completely or upgrading this to Drupal 9 with a new design.
Dave Hansen-Lange (45:43):
Lastly, we’re going to look here at, this is not so much a website, but a web platform. AFT has 1,300 websites on this one platform for States and Locals within a state. And the center one up top here, this is for a campaign website. And this is an example of a few things: One, it’s not their primary website, it’s not aft.org. And so if you’ve got more than one website, you don’t have to choose the same option for all of them. You can choose different options. Number two, there’s a lot of custom stuff involved here, as you might imagine. Some stuff around creating a new website, around connecting the information altogether. So because of that, you might lean more to one of the options that works better for custom stuff and doesn’t require recreating all of their custom stuff in a brand new website.
Sarah Durham (47:07):
Thank you, Dave. So a quick question, before we talk about where you go from here. Just want to confirm the ACLU, the sections of the ACLU site that are still in Drupal, or are those WordPress?
Dave Hansen-Lange (47:22):
That is in Drupal. Yes.
Sarah Durham (47:26):
Okay, so Dave is going to be advancing some slides for me. So I will ask you, Dave, to go onto the next slide. And basically, before we flip over to your questions and discussion, and in the remaining time we have together, what I want to get you thinking about is how to make a plan. And it’s interesting we’re doing this today because actually I had a call with somebody at a higher ed institution this morning, who’s got an old site and they are debating what their options are. They were describing a lot of feelings of being overwhelmed. I think that, you know, these days with the reality of what’s going on in the world with COVID, with elections, all that kind of stuff, tackling these kinds of big projects is feeling pretty daunting. So I wrote an article about planning and we’ll share links to that article and a bunch of other things.
Sarah Durham (48:20):
Dave has also written a really helpful post about Drupal 7’s end-of-life. At the end of this webinar and also in the follow-up email, we’ll send you one of the things I wrote. The first step is to make a plan and you don’t have to have all the answers. You’ve just got to begin by getting your team on the same page about the implications. I think that’s one of the big barriers that a lot of people are facing is that they’ve got these Drupal sites and there is a real challenge coming up, a real cliff coming up for many of you that you’ve got to begin to get your team aligned around so that you can budget and plan appropriately. Next slide please, Dave. So I recommend that you come up with a plan, which you could do in five slides or in two pages.
Sarah Durham (49:05):
And the intention of this plan is actually to give you an internal document you can use to get your team on the same page and build some buy-in. So you can see first you’d start by outlining the situation. I think we’ve given you some of the ammunition for that conversation and in today’s session or in the articles we’ll share with you, and what the risk is to your organization. You might want to outline some options if it’s clear to you and the people on your team where you should go from Drupal 7. You might go forward with outlining some options or making a recommendation, but honestly, if you’re not sure which way to go, a good partner should help you get there, too. So if you don’t have the answers already in mind, if it’s not clear to you which way to go, it might be that you map out a few options.
Sarah Durham (49:52):
But your recommendation might be more to find a partner to help you navigate that. Of course Advomatic can do that. We would love to help you make a decision about this, and we do regularly do that as part of our work. There are many people you could work with who could do that. I think one of the things that’s also really important in your plan is mapping out a timeline, not so much for the build or the upgrade that you might do, but all the things leading up to it. If you are looking ahead and thinking what you really need to do is rebuild your website or do a significant upgrade, that’s going to take time and a lot of work, and you’re going to want to get your team on the same page about when the budget needs to be approved, and when you’re going to get rolling so that you’re doing it hopefully well in advance of some of the deadlines that are going to be important within your organization and within the Drupal 7 end-of-life timeline.
Sarah Durham (50:49):
You know, in the non-profit sector, one of the key pieces that is in my experience kind of do-or-die for many big projects is building buy-in. So with that plan in mind, I would encourage you to have some conversations, share it, get it into the budgeting process and kind of keep it alive because very often you know, you mentioned these things once or twice, but there’s so many things going on that are taking up so much attention and energy for the leaders of organizations today that I think you’re going to have a little bit of work to do to keep it alive, which is the next step. My next slide. Also, keeping it alive is about not just writing this plan and sending it to people, but keep nudging and keep bringing it up. If you know what your milestones are when people are talking about budgets or budgets are getting approved, you know, those are great opportunities to research, collate your plan and go from there.
Sarah Durham (51:47):
Now, many organizations that we work with and talk to are already doing this, and they’re already talking to us and other people about what they’re doing. And a partner can also help you figure out your timeline. So there are a lot of ways to do this. You don’t have to do the heavy lifting on your own. But what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to wait until you’re, you know, a couple of months away from these deadlines if they pose significant risks or implications for your organization. So we have a few minutes left to go before the top of our hour. And I want to hear a little bit from you. So if you’ve got questions or comments, you can either use the Q&A feature, which you will see at the bottom of your screen, or you can chat them in to Dave and I, as we go. And we’re going to stop sharing our screen. Now we’ll take a few questions and while you chat those in, I also want to just remind everybody that we are going to be sending out a follow-up link to the recording here. And Theresa is also going to chat out a couple of the articles we mentioned. Dave has written a really helpful article about D7 end-of-life. He’s also written an article about D8 and there’s an article I’ve written that’s about how you, how you plan for this change. So Theresa will chat those all out.
Sarah Durham (53:17):
Okay, Dave, first question for you. Somebody is chatting in about administrators and they’re thinking, well, actually, this is sort of a double-barreled question. Let’s take it in two parts. First in option A, you talked about building a new site as option A. You specifically talked about WordPress and Drupal. Both of those are open source technologies. Why are you talking just about WordPress and Drupal and not any other systems?
Dave Hansen-Lange (53:46):
One of the things that I also talked about was like, kind of the momentum of these projects, like Drupal is large. WordPress is ginormous. And there’s lots of movement in those projects. There’s lots of momentum as soon as someone has a new idea or a new technology pops up on the internet, like things move quickly. And there’s a way to do it on your website in short order. And I also talked about the security group, that’s not the official title, but like there’s ways like that in which you’re getting the benefits of someone else volunteering their time for your website, which you just don’t get in in some of the other options that you have.
Sarah Durham (54:37):
Okay, thank you. And the second part of this question was about comparing WordPress and Drupal about administrators and the options there. This person is talking about how there’s lots of different people in their organization, who right now have different layers of access in Drupal 7. And they’re wondering if there are any recommendations you have for new platforms based on that kind of complexity.
Dave Hansen-Lange (55:01):
Yeah, so like the area of editorial permissions and controls, like that’s one of the big differentiators between Drupal and WordPress. WordPress has some basic systems around this role can do this, or this role can do that. In Drupal, we can make things a whole lot more complicated, like people who manage this section of the website, they can upload images. Other people can use those images, but only the original group of people can edit them or ways of more complicated things that you can do in Drupal.
Sarah Durham (55:38):
Okay, so there’s a question here about the difference between a Drupal new build and a Drupal upgrade in terms of cost. And actually, would you mind just bringing it up again, cause somebody chatted to me that they arrived a bit late and they didn’t see your slide. I think it’s your slide number six, which outlines all the options. Let’s just quickly go back to that slide for a second and share that. And I think that the question that just got chatted into me relates to this. So on slide six, you mapped out a bunch of different options ranging from building a new site to staying on Drupal 7. And those were ranked, as you talked about them from most expensive to least expensive. So you said building a new site is the most expensive, staying on Drupal 7 is the least expensive, and then the upgrade or the switching to Backdrop were in between. So the question is about the cost differential between building a new site in Drupal 9 and upgrading in Drupal 9. I assume that there are additional costs for design, for UX, things like that, and building a new website, but how significant is that differential? What other variables inform the cost difference there?
Dave Hansen-Lange (57:06):
Yeah, so I talked about sort of in any of these higher options… well, no, let me rephrase that. In the two middle options, you have the option of how much redesign you want to do, of course. And that’s probably the biggest thing that affects how big or small upgrading to Drupal 9, that project is going to be. But let’s say you wanted to redesign and compare upgrading to Drupal 9 versus creating a new website in Drupal 9. It’s difficult to be put on the spot, but I don’t know, 80%, 90% since you’re doing a full redesign. Upgrading to Drupal 9 and moving to a new website, they start to become more similar. The more you’re redesigning, the similar in cost.
Sarah Durham (58:01):
Okay, thank you. That sounds like what we were expecting. So I am just skimming through your questions and it looks like a couple of other questions that we have here are pretty unique to specific organizations, so I’m going to follow up directly with those organizations since we are just about out of time. I want to thank Theresa and Dave for joining us today. Dave, thank you for imparting your wisdom on this topic. And I want to thank everybody who took the time to log in and watch this. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have specific questions or concerns or things you want to pick our brain about, you can always email us at sarah@advomatic.com or dave@advomatic.com. We’d be happy to get on the phone with you, talk a little bit about your situation if that is of use to you. And again, Theresa will be sending out a link to these articles and the recording to you in just a few days. So thank you, all. And thank you all for the excellent work you do to make the world a better place. Be well, thanks.