Newly Redesigned Boston.gov Just Went Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Newly Redesigned Boston.gov Just Went Open Source

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103 pointsrmason23 comments

It's not just the website, it's all the code behind the services. Plenty of city websites here in Michigan don't offer translation or let you pay for (or dispute) things like parking tickets.

I realize that they will have to hire someone to write the glue code to integrate into the individual city's systems, but I'd be willing to bet it might not be more than they paid a designer to build their existing site.

In fact someone might be able to build an entire consulting service around this code base.

Spreading online serve yourself functionality for everyone, not just those in larger cities might be Boston.gov's enduring legacy.

Boston also worked with us to open source the system we've been building with them to help house the homeless. https://github.com/greenriver/boston-cas

As someone very interested in helping solve homelessness, this is relevant to my interests!

In before the PHP hate..

But seriously, this is a great move, and hopefully the start of helping other cities and municipalities provide more services to their citizens!

There was a startup discussed on here recently that was a SaaS platform for city management, I wonder if they have APIs that could be integrated into something like this.

The project is built from drupal, the same CMS is used for whitehouse.gov. It seems drupal is seeing a pretty good up take for these types of websites.

Enterprise Drupal is huge.

As a Drupal frontender, I still get suprised when I discover another common site I use is actually on Drupal.

are you aware of why this is so? is it that the talent around this sector is drupal based... or the CMS nature of the platform is something that bureaucracy likes?

The security story for Drupal is quite good from the government perspective. It is used by many serious organizations, so there are a lot people to find bugs and problems. The Drupal community have a formalized standing security committee who cover the core code and the most commonly used modules. They issue security patches on a predictable, regular schedule. And many of the core developers are employed by one company--Acquia--who sells enterprise software support subscriptions.

That checks a lot of boxes for enterprises in general, and governments in particular.

Plus it is a very powerful framework but is way cheaper than "traditional" license-based enterprise solutions like Oracle CMS. And it's open source, which is citizen-friendly and gives governments better long-term ownership of their technology.

Finally, although Drupal developers are their own sort of special flower (hopefully changing with Drupal 8), there are a lot of them and a lot of companies that provide Drupal development. So if you have to fire a vendor, you'll be able to find another one to step in without too much fuss.

All European government websites are also built on Drupal.

It has become the defacto standard. Unfortunately, because it's a big mess indeed.

All can't be right because at least the system of the German federal government "Government Site Builder" is based on CoreMedia 8, which is a Java CMS.

> All European government websites are also built on Drupal.

I know at least one that isn't: https://gov.uk/

They also open-source all their stuff: https://github.com/alphagov

Please don't lump PHP into the pile of shameful garbage that is the DrupalPress world. Most Drupal developers don't even know how to write modern production quality PHP since one does very little writing of PHP when building a Drupal based website. I've even spoken to a couple people who consider working with Drupal for an extended period of time an automatic disqualification for applicants of PHP developer positions. There is a lot of great PHP being written these days. It's just far, far away from DrupalPress.

Is there a good alternative to Drupal? I haven't peeked under the hood but as a user I was super impressed with how easily I could snap together a heavily customized Drupal site with user-driven contributions that were well-structured. Not just blogs, but we were running maps for the Cube /Sauerbraten game engines with screenshots and compatibility-tags whatnot, and use flexinode to provide a consistent structure to the list of content. Users could rate the content, comment, moderate comments, etc.

The plugin system was well-curated and the config pages were powerful and clear.

Drupal may be awful under the hood, but I was very impressed with how much I could do without peeking under there or even googling "how do I X?".

I'd love to see somebody take a modern tech stack like .Net Core and Postgres or something like that and build a cleaner version of same.

My comment was less about the underlying platform and more about the approach of sharing their work.

The article mentions that this comes three months after a redesign. I love it that they are open sourcing the code, but at first I was wondering, why not do it before the redesign so that contributors could really dig into the project and be drawn into the project? Upon further reflection, though, I think the right way to view this is that they are open sourcing the site before the next redesign. I can't want to watch this unfold, and maybe I'll even chip in. It's great to know that I can!

well, i'd say: this now is the minimum viable product, from here on people can improve to make what it should be.

> boston.gov

Interestingly broken on mobile. Open menu, swipe and the whole page looks weird.

It's a bug related to fixed positioning that loses its fixedness. I spent an age trying to fix it on a site a while back. IIRC problem was worse on Android than iOS.

one of the really interesting things for me is that the boston.gov web/digital team isn't just an arm of marketing/pr/it.

nice work! from a jellos public servant on the other side of the planet.

That blue on blue when you open the sidebar! WTF people?

you know where the source is

It feels above average compared to the typical government site, but still a decade behind modern design. I wonder if open source will improve this? Props to the team for open sourcing it.

You think that's what websites looked like in 2006?

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