Meetup going global
The benefits of the virtual Meetup format is the ability to have speakers from different locations. This time, we had Scott from Tokyo and Morgan from Brisbane. The Meetup was hosted by Vladimir Roudakov from the Brisbane Meetup and Murray Woodman from the Sydney Meetup.
Lessons learned from over 10 years and 250k sites
The first presentation was by Scott Massey from Pantheon who spoke about the security, performance and workflow lessons he’s learned from running 250,000 websites over the past 10 years. Scott is the General Manager of APAC (Asia-Pacific countries) for Pantheon and is based in Tokyo, Japan - so if you ever need to know of a good ramen place, he’ll be glad to take you there.
Scott pointed out through research done by Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations , that 80% of all hacking occurs through the use of credentials being stolen or through brute force such as password packing. The breach itself is often found by security researchers or third parties. Many queries from Pantheon’s customers focus on three areas:
How to identify good bots versus bad bots.
What DoS (denial-of-service) and DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks look like.
How to differentiate between a genuine traffic spike versus an unwelcome attack.
Whether bots are good or bad, they’re here to stay and make up about 30% of traffic. There is also a growing threat of DDoS attacks, with 80% more DDoS attacks since early 2019 (Digital Attack .
Scott provided seven main tips for keeping your site secure:
Bots - CDN + WAF
Keep core up to date
Choose modules wisely
Do things “the Drupal way”
No “cowboy coding”
Captcha
HTTPS
You can view the full recording of this presentation on the DrupalSouth YouTube :
GOMA showcase: Using Drupal, Tome generator and Algolia Search
The second presentation was a showcase by Morgan Strong on how he generated a static Art Gallery catalogue using Drupal , the Tome and Algolia .
Due to COVID-19, museums and art galleries (which tend to be physically based) had to reimagine how they would offer their services. MVPs (minimum viable products), agile and early release frameworks are not commonly used in the publishing and art museum space. However Morgan, who is the Digital Transformation Manager at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, was tasked with redeveloping the online catalogue from the ground up, with an ambitious three week timeframe.
The beta collection site that he built in three weeks used Drupal 8 for generating the site, the Feeds module for importing content into Drupal 8, the Tome module for generating the static site from Drupal, and Views to output formatted JSON and Algolia Search for the search and navigation.
Currently there are 180,000 items in the collection. Only half of them are digitised, with the plan to digitise the remainder over the next three years.
He used a static site instead of a standard Drupal site because:
Museum catalogues are excellent candidates for static web as there’s a lot of content that’s infrequently updated
Drupal is really good at data modelling
There are various methods to import data: , , Entity
Drupal is more maintainable than having to manage a server
Algolia has a React-based app that can be easily inserted as a Drupal block
He only had three weeks and decided to use familiar tools
You can view the beta version here:
You can view the full recording of this presentation on the DrupalSouth YouTube :
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If you have any feedback or suggestions on what you’d like to see for future Meetups, or if you have something you’d like to present, please contact kristy.devries@salsadigital.com.au.
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