Boston Public Schools (www.bostonpublicschools.org)

The Boston Public Schools' new system-wide website was released at the beginning of September. The site provides a great deal of information about the system, its programs, and its schools. In the first month, the site has gotten more than 1 million hits. It was built by Keane, Inc, and commissioned by the Communications Office, the Office of Instructional and Information Technology (OIIT), and the Office of Human Resources. It launched on August 28, 2008.

Background

The school system, having had a small, static website for several years, wanted web content management and a lot of other features. They decided to hire my company, which is Keane, to do the work. (Keane is a large IT consulting company with an office in Boston.) I was the technical lead for the project, and said that Drupal was more than up to the challenge. I told them that by using open source, and deploying to a separate cloud computing environment, they could save a lot of money. Also, we could sidestep vendor selection and internal release management and deployment processes.

Technology

From a technical point of view, there is nothing particularly interesting about the site. It uses Drupal 5.10, and we added in about 35 other common modules. (Not enough modules were ready in time for us to consider Drupal 6 while we were building it.) We migrated the old content off of the old site through a combination of manual copying and a screen-scraping program I wrote in Ruby. The site is hosted on a medium-sized Joyent Accelerator, which is a cloud-computing style virtual instance of OpenSolaris that costs $75 a month. We used Apache 2, MySQL 5, JQuery and Prototype. We wrote a weekly backup script that puts the files and database dump into Amazon's S3 using the open source s3sync program. So it was a 100% open source project that leveraged cloud computing whenever possible. While this approach is common in the startup world, it was revolutionary for city government.

Future Directions

Other than integrating other systems into the website, they are considering providing one or more site-building frameworks to allow sub-sites. This would be done so that individual schools could have the ability to create and maintain their own website inside the public one. We're not sure exactly how we're going to implement that, but I'm sure it's possible.

Thanks

Thanks to the Drupal community for a great product and so many contributions and insights.

Contact Information

If you have questions about how the site was built, you can leave comments here. If you want to talk to the school system about it, you can contact them at: communications@bostonpublicschools.org