For a handful of our non-technical team members, workshops such as those hosted by She Codes provide a great environment to expand their understanding of web development.  She Codes hosts one-day weekend workshops for women and non-binary individuals to introduce them to coding. Sophie Darnell wrote about taking advantage of a virtual She Codes workshop at the beginning of the pandemic. Although these classes are outside of normal working hours, they are recognised as work hours by the company. 

While as a company we fully embrace continual learning, we also enjoy giving back and fostering the learning of others. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Software Engineer Sarah Aldrich donated many evenings and weekends to mentor for the She Codes Plus six-month bootcamp. 

Our team at Gaia Resources are a pretty diverse bunch, and the ways we prefer to learn and communicate are pretty diverse too. We have a broad range of skills and an amazing cohort of colleagues who are happy to share what they know. So sometimes when we want to learn a new skill, the first place to start is with each other.

Gaia Resources prefers to use open source software in our solutions, where appropriate (Read Chris’s introduction to open source software here). One open source solution that we have implemented for our clients is Drupal. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), available to download for free. One of our Senior Developers, Brianna Williams (Bri), has been using her knowledge and experience with Drupal to bring open source content management systems to our clients. One of the most recent of these was the delivery of the Collections Online solution for the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) late last year. She is also a member of the Drupal Brisbane Meetup group, sharing ideas and challenges with other developers using the platform.

Bri realised that other team members (mostly non-technical) were interested in expanding their knowledge of CMSs but struggled to find solid foundational beginner resources. Having had positive experiences using Pantheon hosting on Drupal projects, and benefiting from their online resources, she decided it would be a good place for the team to start. While the resources themselves are self-paced and online, it can often be intimidating if you are starting ‘from scratch’ to complete them by yourself. If you encounter an issue, there may not be many ways to solve it in real-time, and it is harder to confidently complete. Bri recognised these barriers to entry and arranged a session for interested team members to work through the training together, with a dedicated chat line for her to help out anyone who got stuck as soon as possible, and for us all to learn from each other’s mistakes.

Voon-Li Chung leading an Arduino lesson

Once a month, all Software Engineers meet to discuss tools and practises, to stay abreast of what is happening in the field. In these meetings we also share the outcomes of personal PD projects and discuss avenues for future ones. Recently the Software Engineers have embarked on a bit of group PD. One of our mobile developers, Voon Li Chung, kindly volunteered to run Arduino workshops for all interested parties. Upon completion of official business, the Software Engineering meetings turn into hands-on lessons where Voon-Li guides us in a build. Each lesson is designed to build on previous lessons and to demonstrate specific capabilities of Arduinos. Starting with turning on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and making them flash, we have progressed to learning about H-Bridges that will eventually enable our robots to move both forward and in reverse.  

It is great to learn with a team who are so interested in taking on new challenges and discovering new solutions. Whether we are learning from each other or teaching each other, Gaia Resources has successfully fostered an environment where we are all comfortable exploring new things.

If you want to be a part of a team that values learning or if you have something you can teach our team, reach out! We would love to hear from you. Reach out directly via info@gaiaresources.com.au or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Sarah

The post Learning Never Ends: Professional Development at Gaia Resources appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The study focused on BRUVS (Baited Remote Underwater Video System) footage, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to collect data and accelerate our understanding of fish in our oceans. AIMS and other researchers spend a lot of time manually capturing data from the videos, so finding efficiency measures and improvements to data consistency and quality would be of tremendous value. Out of the study we built a prototype application for processing and visualising BRUVS data, including automatically identifying and counting tropical fish species.  

Taking the OzFish open dataset and many hours of AIMS BRUVS footage, the team focused on training the AI model to accurately identify a range of fish species representing rare and common fish, fast moving and very small species, schools of overlapping fish and also differentiating morphologically similar species. Demonstrating  the effectiveness of our method for these specific challenges, allowing us to produce quantified, highly accurate results. We are now able to look confidently ahead towards tackling hundreds of species that live in Australia’s tropical waters.

The Fishscale online prototype – video metadata and playpack showing annotations and count statistics.

When we look back at it, we’ve achieved an incredible amount in a short space of time. Our nationally distributed team (Perth, Brisbane, Darwin) worked really hard to make sure we were on the same page and productive with online meetings, collaborations and workshops. This was no small feat when you think we had two COVID-19 lockdowns affecting our Queensland team members.

With a new Fishscale prototype web interface, a new BRUVS video can be uploaded and processed within minutes. While the researcher grabs a coffee, it generates the statistics they need to help model and understand population ecology and fish behaviour. There’s an important human quality control element as well, meaning that fish experts have the ability to make corrections, improve the model and increase the value of their data. 

We really enjoyed the regular interaction with the AIMS team as well, which helped us to design our Fishscale prototype with exciting features that will eventually deliver lots of value and efficiency gains for research workflows and other industry applications. 

So what happens next? Well, there is still plenty to do if we progress to the next phase. We know there are still challenges around much larger numbers of species, variations in water quality and environmental factors. In phase 2, our plan includes customising the user interface to adapt to different user types depending on their requirements for data capture and output. Different products based on the AI framework will have different audiences in mind depending on whether they come from research, monitoring, education, or not for profit groups.

We are confident this is just the beginning of an exciting journey to develop a highly valuable product for streamlining research workflows and generation of important statistics. In fact, the Proof of Concept phase starts up around September, and we are hopeful we can progress and continue working with AIMS on this key initiative. 

If you are interested in this space or are someone who works with underwater videos and fish identification, we would love to get your perspective for future development. Feel free to give me a call or an email though if this type of work interests you – strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Artificial Intelligence for fish species identification appeared first on Gaia Resources.

AWS Case Study

AWS Summary Slide

An extract from the case study is below:

Late last year, we answered a call from the Association of Volunteer Bushfire Brigades of Western Australia, who were seeking a partner to help develop a proof of concept mobile app and web site that would support the volunteers fighting bushfires around WA. Then, in early 2020, funding became available to develop a much more fully-featured product, resulting in the Essential Service Volunteers (ESV) app, which was launched back in April.

Bushfire Volunteers WA worked closely with us to create a smartphone app that helps emergency services volunteers register, track activities, and access local merchant offers. The app:

• empowers volunteers to track activities for medical and employment reimbursement
• enables offline use with the ability to sync data when users go online again, and
• created an app with utility for all public emergency services

Our CEO, Piers Higgs, was quoted as saying:

Our hope is that this app will make the lives of bushfire volunteers easier and be adopted broadly throughout various public service agencies across Australia. Using the power of the AWS Cloud enables us to do so with security, scalability, and cost-efficiency that would not be possible any other way.

Being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, our team chose to build the app on the AWS Cloud. Using AWS means Bushfire Volunteers WA doesn’t have to manage infrastructure or pay for more capacity than it needs, and because bushfires are largely seasonal, it’s a solution that can scale up as volunteer brigades need to use it, and then scale back down again when the needs are less urgent.

Our implementation relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide image and object storage, and uses Amazon CloudFront to speed content delivery. In addition, AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles web app deployment, including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and app health monitoring, further reducing management overhead for both Gaia Resources and the Association. The app also takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for foundational compute services and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL for fully managed database service.

You can read more about our AWS strategy in recent blogs here and here and if you’d like to know more then please drop angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au a line, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Supporting Emergency Services appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Of course, Covid-19 caused a number of disruptions for both our staff and the client. For the Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades of WA, regular brigade meetings were interrupted and so word of mouth knowledge of the app was impacted. For Gaia Resources ESV App team, going to lock-down to keep everyone safe made it somewhat harder to collaborate on ESV Stage 2. But by no means impossible! Gaia Resources management quickly responded to comprehensively support working from home and so development continued at a good pace.

Screenshots from the ESV app

During this stage, our development team also commenced work the web-based administrative portal to manage volunteers, brigades, businesses and the reporting of data. The admin portal is looking to be in a usable state this week and has just been presented to the clients for comment. Work will then continue for the near future to make it even better for all parties.

Bunbury Volunteer Bushfire Brigade – Cadets (photo courtesy AVBFBWA)

For more detailed information about the ES Volunteers App, including usage instructions and information for suppliers that would like to list a special offer for volunteers, please visit www.esvolunteers.org.au — help these guys help our community.

If you’re interested in how mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to comment below, contact me at angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Wishing you all well in this trying time and hope you are keeping safe.

Gus

The post Essential Service Volunteers App update appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The new submissions portal complements DWER’s existing online repository of land-based biodiversity surveys in Western Australia, known as the Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessments (IBSA).

The objective of IBSA is to capture and consolidate data contained in biodiversity survey reports to support assessments and compliance under the Environmental Protection Act (1986). The survey data and reports are available for everyone to download from the IBSA repository, delivering:

• improved quality of data for assessment
• a broader decision-making base for regulators
• an expanded knowledge base of WA’s flora and fauna
• improved availability of environmental information for the community.

The new IBSA Submissions portal enables proponents to submit and digitally sign a data package for later ingestion into IBSA itself (Source: DWER 2020 IBSA factsheet)

The new IBSA Submission Portal makes it easy for proponents to submit biodiversity surveys via a single page web-form. The web-form automatically validates files on upload and immediately alerts the proponent when information or files do not meet the IBSA data standards. This makes completing the process very responsive for the proponent and provides greater consistency in the submissions process. It also provides efficiency gains for the DWER officers, significantly reducing the time they need to spend checking IBSA submissions, which results in time savings for the broader environmental assessment process.

We developed the IBSA Submissions Portal using Serverless technology; this is a lightweight, innovative approach that provides a highly responsive system but eliminates the cost of managing servers. A key component of the Serverless approach was ensuring that the new submissions portal is a conduit, temporarily housing the data packages until they are incorporated into DWERs existing IBSA database.

While the submission workflow is relatively simple at this stage (survey submission and sign-off), it has a flexible design that can be expanded to accommodate more complex workflow steps if required. The project was designed and delivered within a three month period, including significant testing rounds.

The IBSA Submissions Portal is now launched and in production.

If you’d like to know more about our work with portal development using serverless technologies, and how it can help you improve your stakeholder interactions and process efficiency, please send me an email or start a conversation via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

The post IBSA Submissions Portal launch appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Screenshot of the Q-Album home page

After the program concluded there were a number of iterations, design improvements, and customer testing rounds which led to the development of Q-Album, which went live with a soft launch in late 2019. Q-Album hosts over 500 historic collection items from the collection and has now been opened to community groups across Queensland to contribute their historic items to build a community resource.

The platform includes:

• comparisons between historic photos and modern street views,
• digitised archival materials,
• publishing workflows between community groups and QSA,
• mapping tools,
• tag-based taxonomies of content,
• organisational profiles, and
• cross-referencing to TROVE and other historic data sources.

If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help with you archives project, let me know via email or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Q-Album – visualising Queensland’s archive collections appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The program is managed by the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) and is delivered in partnership with seven regional Natural Resource Management (NRM) groups. The program currently has almost 2000 properties across Western Australia.

Land for Wildlife property owners, Robyn and Andy McElroy, at Boyup Brook – photo ©Parks and Wildlife

The team here at Gaia Resources are really excited to support this valuable nature conservation program by doing what we love – delivering sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place.

We developed a web-based spatial system to manage information about the existing LFW properties and new applicants to the program.

The system allows DBCA and regional NRM officers to view and edit the data in an integrated system, with all officers able to see updates in real-time. This makes collaboration much easier, both within each group and across all eight organisations. It also saves officer time (previously information was stored across multiple formats and systems) allowing officers to focus on the landholders and wildlife conservation.

The LFW GRID allows real-time collaboration and centralised data management for many users across eight partner organisations

The system also has a new webpage for the public to register their interest in the program. This connects directly into the spatial system, so DBCA and NRM officers can see new applications in real-time.

The LFW registration page submits data directly into the LFW GRID, visible to DBCA and NRM officers in real-time

We also set up the system to trigger an email to the LFW program coordinator and relevant regional NRM group as soon as a new application is submitted.

The system is based on our GRID product (Geographic & Reporting Information Database). This is an easy-to-use, online geographical information system (GIS) for regional NRM groups.

It allows regional NRM staff to record valuable information about NRM work in their region (for example, weed control, revegetation etc) and encourages real-time collaboration between staff within an NRM group, and across multiple NRM groups working on the same project.

GRID was originally developed for South West Catchments Council and is currently in use in seven NRM groups, and two other whole-of-state programs (State NRM and the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System).

GRID is a great example of how NRM groups can leverage and build upon each other’s investment in one system, resulting in a product that is tailored for each group’s specific needs but grounded in a common platform with which the vast majority of the NRM community are familiar.

For LFW we worked closely with DBCA, Peel-Harvey Catchment Council (PHCC) and the other regional NRM groups to tailor this version of GRID to suit the workflow and partnership-based delivery of the LFW program. This work was completed as part of a State NRM Program funded project, managed by the PHCC and DBCA.

If you’d like to know more about GRID and how it can help you improve collaboration and efficiency in your organisation and partnerships, please send me an email or start a conversation via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

The post Land for Wildlife gets a boost with GRID appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So if you are interested in the topic, and have 45 mins to spare, I invite you to watch my talk.

If you happen to be at the conference, I’ll be running a workshop on Friday 29 November on using accessibility testing tools and conducting an audit.

Otherwise, feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post WCAG 2.1, Web Accessibility and Drupal 8 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Heres another gauntlet thrown down by Piers: assemble a GIS tiger team for fifty hours to explore ‘what can you do help people visualise readily available spatial data for a significant group of organisms in their particular area of interest AND let them download a field guide for just those taxa’.

Barbara and Jake G. tackled the spatial side of the question while Jake T. explored ways to transform the resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the first choice as they provide an impressive range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with (illustrated below).

Drawing on large data sets presents its own issues, and there are some 750,000 fungi specimen and observation records available in the ALA. For query and presentation responsiveness we chose to limit the query to just one large order in Kingdom Fungi – the Agaricales.  Similarly, limits to the number of records retrieved (500) were also implemented in case the area drawn is very large.  Currently, the tool is aimed at medium-size areas, such as Bold Park, a coastal conservation reserve in Perth, as illustrated below.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

So here’s how you use the mapping interface:

1. select your fungal family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project provides an informative case study for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any major taxonomic group.

Given more time we would have liked to add to the map point clustering and record counts, and a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and we’d really like to do more on attributing those images properly!

We uncovered some technical issues also, such as repeated 404 timeouts with retrieving ALA data, and noted the lack of map tile services at the scale required.  Similarly, the species-level data is uneven, with a lack of representative images or descriptive text to better meet the real-world requirements of a Field Guide.  We also need to check through some of the delivered data in more detail – some of the data we receive appears to be getting truncated along the line.

Never-the-less, given the fifty person-hours available, we are quite happy with this result!

We’d like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the RBG Victoria’s FungiMap project, which has contributed much of the data we have harvested for this project.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the webmap, or know more about how we can help you with research programs, data management or spatial information systems, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Challenge: Dynamic Fungi Field Guide appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The post Environmental Health, Data Standards and Open Source Software appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The State NRM Office are a part of the State government Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) and are involved in coordinating, funding and reporting on NRM efforts in the State. A big part of that is their provision of the Community Stewardship Grants round released in mid 2018. Their existing grant software – while powerful in its own right – did not allow applicants to specify where they were going to be doing particular proposed activities “on the ground”. A whole range of questions could begin to be answered with this data, to do with geographic distribution of activities by type, alignment with regional strategies, and program effectiveness.

As an existing GRID customer, the State NRM office saw the potential in the web mapping product to help them catalog these proposed activities and to assess and track grant applications from organisations spread all over the State. However, they needed something that would be simple to use with no training required, and guide them smoothly through the steps of their application. GRID with its rich functionality and different modules just wasn’t going to work as an entry point for applicants new to the world of geospatial software. While GRID is great for a range of NRM activities, we were looking here at applicants who initially had one task they needed to achieve. If you think about the experience you get when you use a (good) in-car navigation or banking app, that’s the kind of experience we were going for where there are minimal mouse clicks and buttons involved – as outlined in the accompanying video we made to help grant applicants.

Our team for the project, including one of our Technical Leads, Tony Prior, along with fellow software engineer James Patrick and yours truly, were all convinced that there was a good fit between the grant application process and GRID. Something more tailored and targeted to the grant process was needed; at the end of the day the data it would generate is also of importance for State NRM office business processes.

So, we designed and implemented a RESTful API (Application Interface) as an enhancement to GRID. This gives us a means of exchanging data  between GRID and a separate web application that we developed, called GRID Grants. GRID Grants provides a step-by-step workflow to define proposed on-ground and capability activities like fencing, weed control, and community events. The State NRM office is able to control several aspects of the GRID Grants content through GRID itself. As shown in the video above, applicants can search for a location, specify a number of activities, draw specific features on a map view and enter other relevant data.

The RESTful API opens the door for future similar projects where GRID integration is required.  It’s also a mobile responsive tool written in Angular, which shows how we can leverage the best frameworks for the solutions that we offer.

We didn’t only just deliver a technical solution, though – we wanted to make sure that it worked for our audience before we released it! We do adopt an Agile methodology to software development where it works for our clients and their projects, and this enables client feedback to be taken into consideration during the development of a product. This provided real benefit during the GRID Grants development – we had the opportunity to have a second crack at our “less than ideal” first version.  The first time around made sense to those familiar with data entry products, but not to the general public. Through consultation with the client and testing – with real applicants! – we were able to flesh-out an alternative user experience design that ‘clicked’ for people of varying technical backgrounds. With this change, our testers suddenly understood the link between features on the map and the information they needed to associate with that feature.

So along the way in the project, we also did some swift pivots to help the client with issues other than just delivering a technical solution. We also developed the YouTube help video above, which the State NRM Office really appreciated when the grant round opened and some 150 applicants suddenly started using the system.  We also provided additional phone and email support for the applicants when half the State NRM office got sick in the final days of the application round!

We’ve had some great feedback directly from applicants, and we are looking forward to the next phase of work with the State NRM Office to help with even smoother and easier tracking of the approved projects and reporting.  Working with the NRM industry is very close to our core mission of enabling our clients to make the positive changes to the environment they look after, and so this is a great opportunity to support the industry even more.

If GRID, or GRID Grants, look like solutions that your organisation could use for managing your spatial data, feel free to reach out and start a conversation with either Tony or myself. We can contacted by email, or feel free to kick off a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

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Without going into the requirements (or more importantly the implementation) too much, there was a heavy need for: publishing and publications management; groups and moderation workflows; distributed authorship; content taxonomy and classification management; consumption by multiple devices; and most importantly, low cost of development and ongoing management.

Sounds like heaven?

At Gaia, we’re technically agnostic. While we have certain preferences, we implement what’s best for the client. In the two years I’ve worked here, I’ve worked on Drupal, WordPress, Magento, CollectiveAccess, Artefactual Atom, Archivematica, Angular Single Page Apps (SPA), Knockout SPA, and investigated a range of other technologies, like Static Site Generators (SSG), before making our recommendations. The point is, we make an analysis, and choose what we think is best and can support in an ongoing fashion.

This blog will go into why I recommended Drupal 8 and the factors we considered to come to that decision.

Firstly, we deal in Open Source and the client did not have a licensing budget. So goodbye Adobe Experience Manager, SiteCore and other admittedly very good, but expensive publishing platforms and web content management systems.  Realistically, we still needed a Content Management System (CMS) at the core of the project, but a CMS that could publish to multiple consumers. That included quality open source CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress, as well as SSG’s like Jekyll combined with search-as-a-service, like Algolia.

Looking at the publishing requirements, I believed relying on markdown or similar would make SSG a bit hard to manage for the client, but more importantly, they probably didn’t have the ecosystem of plugins / modules required to keep the build costs down.  Similarly, building a nice Javascript SPA site or Javascript powered CMS site like React Static, certainly sounds exciting, but I think the decoupled approach (at least in the short-term) was probably overkill.  In short, I believed that a traditional CMS with lots of modules and plugins was the best fit, ideally one that could progressively be decoupled if needed in the future.

So, next came weighing up the best-fit CMS. I am familiar with both Drupal and WordPress, but no so much Joomla!, Type3 or the multitude of other free CMS platforms that do a good job at managing content. To minimise development costs, sticking with my familiar platforms made a lot of sense. But even more important than that familiarity, WordPress and Drupal are the world’s 1 and 3 most used Content Management Systems, and there are sufficiently massive ecosystems of plugins and modules to ensure we could keep development costs down.

At this junction it became a choice of WordPress vs Drupal 8.

So why did Drupal 8 win out? The short answer was the site requirements were sufficiently complicated in terms of publishing content that it lent itself to the more powerful, albeit somewhat more complicated Drupal 8 platform. WordPress could do it (and we know it well as it powers our own site), but I thought Drupal could do it better.

Let’s look at a few of the aspects I considered, and a caveat, this was a lens specifically about this project: these observations are not necessarily generalisable to other projects:

• Security: much as been made of the recent Drupal vulnerabilities, however, the security team is proactive, and assuming you stick to supported modules and follow the security advisories, you have excellent security. WordPress has automatic security updates to core, but there’s no control over what contributed module authors do. If you stick to core, WordPress is a clear winner, but Drupal 8 is certainly a safer bet (the devil you know) when it comes to the module ecosystem. In this case, I’m personally going to say Drupal is slightly ahead.
• Workflows: this is something managed well in both platforms, moderation, approval queues etc. can be supported easily. No real winner in either camp here.
• Theming: WordPress has an amazing and beautiful ecosystem of themes out there that require only minor theming. This is an important requirement when you are trying to reduce costs as a lot of time can be spent theming. Drupal has some good themes, but usually more time is required. This factor was a consideration strongly in favour of WordPress.
• Maintainability: WordPress is easier. You can generally update from within the admin interface, and as long as you have a good backup procedure, it’s an easy process. Drupal really requires use of Drush and increasingly Composer, which really requires a developer. In terms of developer community and agency support, although Drupal has a big community, WordPress is much larger. This is another one in favour of WordPress.
• Groups and community pages: the “default” community pages in both WordPress (Buddypress) and Drupal (Organic Groups), didn’t really fit the requirements. With further investigation, the requirements were probably simpler than what either of these modules offered. So really, some simple modules and permissions managed what was needed here. No real winner in either camp here.
• Content classification and data modelling: in my opinion, there’s no comparison here and this is what pushed Drupal into the winning position. Building managed taxonomies of content, creating content types, sharing elements between content, and using tools like Drupal Views to expose data, has no comparison. Combined with the ease of creating these custom content models, easily publishing content types APIs for reuse, how you can use search index weighting for aspects within the content types, all combined to push Drupal 8 to the winning position. This was the most important requirement of the project, and thus was the winning factor that overrode WordPress’ other aspects.
• API first: though not required yet, important to be ready for the future. Both platforms support API and progressively decoupled systems. No real winner in either camp here.

This was a bit of a summary of the process I went through to decide on Drupal 8. We’re now in build, and I look forward to sharing the results of the build process in coming months.  If you want to know more about Drupal, our processes, or any of the techs that I mentioned, send an email to morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us via our social media channels – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

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