Drupal for Public Libraries
In Denmark, we have created a common Drupal solution for all public libraries. The solution has been deployed to almost all public libraries in the country, and a community to contribute to the common solution has been established. The community contribute Drupal modules as well as share content between libraries. Commercial companies are involved as well.
The effort has been lead by a governmental organization called DDB - The Danish Digital Library. Gitte Barlach has been very involved in setting up the community and is still involved on a daily basis. She would like to present the solution as a Business Track session.
The solution has three alternative hosting plans: An Editor plan, a Webmaster plan, and a Programmer plan. The Editor plan leaves as much work as possible to the hoster whilst the Programmer plan is close to a hosted server. The Webmaster plan, however, gives the library the freedom to do some development without the need to be an experienced Drupal developer.
The Webmaster plan gave the most headaches whilst creating the solution due to the controlled freedom: Part of the plan is a control panel that enables the customer to create a development server, do some development, move the new codebase to a staging server, and finally move it into production. The solution ended up beeing rather close to the Drupal CI solution - and part of the code developed for the Webmaster plan has found its way into the Drupal CI.
This software is developed by DBC - Danish Bibliographical Centre - that also hosts the solution and runs most of the databases needed for the system to work (in addition to the national bibliography and other library systems). Lars Skjærlund works at DBC and is the one who created the Webmaster solution and later helped port some of the code to Drupal CI.
We would like to propose one or two sessions: With two sessions, Gitte Barlach would like to present the overall solution and the community effort as a Business Track, whilst Lars Skjærlund would like to present the technical solution behind the Webmaster plan as either a Drupal Showcase or a DevOps track. The Webmaster plan involves a web service (called API in Drupal CI), an Aegir installation, and a Jenkins setup - but also a control panel integrated into Drupal 7 as a module with an administrative interface.
If two sessions is one too many, we could make a joint session instead - letting Gitte present the overall solution first, and then let Lars delve into the details of the Webmaster plan.