Shaun, I think you missed my point.

Our Drupal (and per Tom's reply, Wordpress -- ...and I'm going to take a stab in the dark and throw MediaWiki instance into the pile) is, for all intents and purposes, unmaintained because we have no in charge of maintaining it.  Oregon State hosts it, but that's it.

Every year, every year, somebody proposes we ditch the diebold-o-tron for "something else" (Drupal modules, mediawiki plugins, OCS, ... and most recently Easy Chair), yet nobody has ever bothered to do anything besides send an email of what we should use instead.  Because that requires work and commitment.

What I'm saying is, we don't have any central organization, and thus we have no real sustainable way to implement locally hosted services.  The Drupal instance, the diebold-o-tron (and maybe Mediawiki) are legacies from when several of us ran a shared server in a colocation facility.  We had skin in the game.  And then our server got hacked because Drupal was unpatched (which sucked) and we realized we probably needed to take this a little more seriously.

The problem was, though, when we moved to OSU for our hosting, we lost any power to do anything for ourselves and since we no longer had to (nor could) maintain anything, all impetus to do so was lost.

To be clear, when we ran all these services on anvil, that wasn't sustainable either!  We simply don't have the the organization or resources to effectively run this stuff by ourselves.  That's why I'm really not interested in hearing about some x we can run for y if it's not backed up with "and my organization which has shown commitment through z will take on the task of doing all the work on this".

-Ross.

On Dec 4, 2012, at 10:41 AM, Shaun Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Tom, can you post the plugin to Code4Lib's github so we can have a crack at it?
> 
> Ross, I'm not sure how many folks on this list were aware of the Drupal upgrade troubles.  Regardless, I don't think it's constructive to put new ideas on halt until it gets done.  Not everyone's a Drupal developer, but they could contribute in other ways.
> 
> -Shaun
> 
> On 12/4/12 10:27 AM, Tom Keays wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Seriously, folks, if we can't even figure out how to upgrade our Drupal
>>> instance to a version that was released this decade, we shouldn't be
>>> discussing *new* implementations of *anything* that we have to host
>>> ourselves.
>>> 
>> 
>> Not being one to waste a perfectly good segue...
>> 
>> The Code4Lib Journal runs on WordPress. This was a decision made by the
>> editorial board at the time (2007) and by and large it was a good one. Over
>> time, one of the board members offered his technical expertise to build a
>> few custom plugins that would streamline the workflow for publishing the
>> journal. Out of the "box", WordPress is designed to publish a string of
>> individual articles, but we wanted to publish issues in a more traditional
>> model, with all the issues published at one time and arranged in the issue
>> is a specific order. We could (and have done) all this manually, but having
>> the plugin has been a real boon for us.
>> 
>> The Issue Manager plugin that he wrote provided the mechanism for:
>> a) preventing articles from being published prematurely,
>> b) identifying and arranging a set of final (pending) articles into an
>> issue, and
>> c) publishing that issue at the desired time.
>> 
>> That person is no longer on the Journal editorial board and upkeep of the
>> plugin has not been maintained since he left. We're now several
>> WordPress releases
>> behind, mainly because we delayed upgrading until we could test if doing so
>> would break the plugins. We have now tested, and it did. I won't bore you
>> with the details, but if we want to continue using the plugin to manage our
>> workflow, we need help.
>> 
>> Is there anybody out there with experience writing WordPress plugins that
>> would be willing to work with me to diagnose what has changed in the
>> WordPress codex that is causing the problems and maybe help me understand
>> how to prevent this from happening again with future releases?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Tom Keays / [log in to unmask]
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Shaun D. Ellis
> Digital Library Interface Developer
> Firestone Library, Princeton University
> voice: 609.258.1698 | [log in to unmask]