Cathedral of St. Matthew in Washington new website

[Jason Cho]

On Monday, the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. launched our new website after almost a year of development: www.stmatthewscathedral.org . The new site is built on Drupal 9, using a design by Fiat Insight implemented as a subtheme of Bootstrap Barrio, with the migration handled by our company (Lattice Group).

Over the last several years the Cathedral evaluated several parish website hosting platforms, moving to WordPress or BackDrop, or upgrading its Drupal install. There was a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, to retain close to 100% of legacy content, and to build out specific features that aligned with existing workflows and relationships, all of which was easiest to accomplish by remaining on Drupal.

Drupal's migration infrastructure, once set up, is very efficient, and we were able to bring over more than 14,000 content nodes and perhaps twice as many binary assets, plus at least hundreds of configuration settings, all in a day. Once set up, that is. That setup unfortunately still involves a great deal of trial and error, especially as we relied heavily on date handling features that have become splintered across multiple projects and versions—nothing overly exotic, just repeating events, recurrence exceptions, all-day events, and date ranges. There is not even a stable Drupal 8+ release for the Calendar module (the 82nd most popular module out of 49,491, with almost 72,000 active installations), to give you an idea. Ultimately the site had to be converted over to use the new Smart Date contributed module and its separate set of compatible extensions.

Complexities like these, arising out of Drupal's pivot to enterprise, probably explain why D7 sites continue to outnumber D8, D9, and D10 sites combined, more than 7 years since the initial release of Drupal 8, in turn leading to the repeated delay of D7's EOL date. If Drupal sticks to the November 2023 EOL, small organizations with large legacy D7 sites might look to Backdrop CMS (www.backdropcms.org) rather than D10 if they want to remain on a familiar platform.

-Jason Cho

Lattice Group, Inc.

[Jeff Geerling]

Thanks for this comprehensive post about the upgrade! As someone who set up a number of Drupal 7 sites and has now migrated them from Drupal to Drupal, Drupal to Wordpress, and sometimes Drupal to a proprietary system (even a few Drupal to static site, like OpenSourceCatholic.com itself!), I always like to hear from others about their experiences.

Drupal indeed still has a lot more flexibility especially for date-based site functionality than other systems and I agree that it's been a mess since the relative simplicity of modules like Calendar for Drupal 7.

Sadly some of the developers who made some of those 'kitchen sink' modules (I think of Rules too) have moved on from Drupal to other systems, and now those modules will never be fully ported or will be ported only at a base level to Drupal 8/9/10 :(

-Jeff

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[John D'Orazio]

The website looks great! Nice graphics, pleasant navigation. Would you be interested in integrating a Liturgy of the Day module? We can integrate data from the Diocese of Washington into the LitCal project. I can try to put in some time to learning about Drupal modules but I can't promise anything. I've already been procrastinating with the Marriage Booklet project, but I have been quite active in developing the LitCal project. I have just about completed integrating data for the Netherlands and all related dioceses, thanks to Steven van Roode who contacted me and who I've been working with to define all the data. I already have the base US liturgical calendar in place, I would like to start adding more dioceses with their local data. You can even get an Alexa news brief with the Liturgy of the Day for the diocese! That's already in place, it's easy enough to define a new feed for a single diocese.

[John D'Orazio]

Just found this, looks like Drupal is starting to offer the same "Gutenberg" experience as WordPress, and any "Gutenberg" modules should work equally as well with both WordPress and Drupal

https://wptavern.com/drupal-gutenberg-2-6-released-with-drupal-10-compatibility

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[Jason J Cho]

Thank you. In the past, we did publish daily readings, although the unreliability of providers forced us to remove this feature. Catholic.org  still provides an RSS listing the verses. The USCCB provides an RSS with the full text of readings, but we have found these difficult to format correctly. Universalis also has a feed, but I believe it uses its own translations which may differ slightly from the Missal. 

Universalis does provide global and national calendar feeds of observances at http://universalis.com/calendar.htm which seem to be reliable, at least for the US, and we'd likely import something like this if requested, or import it into Google Calendar. But the Cathedral calendar is there primarily to demonstrate the diversity of events hosted there, each category of ministry or organization represented by a different color, and filling up the months going back several years. This is an implementation of FullCalendar (https://fullcalendar.io/ ), fed by a JSON feed provided by a Drupal View.

[Jason Cho]

We did get excited about Gutenberg, but the Drupal version is a ways behind the WordPress—we might as well have implemented Paragraphs (https://www.drupal.org/project/paragraphs) or Panels (https://www.drupal.org/project/panels), the more traditional visual layout editors in Drupal.

Gutenberg regardless of platform is best where you are storing the majority of content for a node within the Body field. It is less satisfying with more complex content types with multiple fields and fieldsets, as these are hidden in a "More settings" block. It also was not compatible with the Gin theme, the new administration theme, although that appears to be rectified with the most recent release.

You also lose control in over what buttons/options appear, compared to CKEditor. The "Insert Special Character" key was especially useful for entering accented characters for Spanish as well as for Greek letters like Ω, but this is not insurmountable if your users are willing to use Character Map on Windows or to learn the keystrokes.

[Beth Nicol]

Just curious -- where do you find the USCCB RSS feed with the full text? I use dailygospel.org -- but I fear it will vanish as they no longer provide the instructions. So, if anything changes, I'm stuck.

I might look at Universalis as well. 

This would be for a WordPress site, not a Drupal site.

[Beth Nicol]

I found the RSS feed. And, it is poorly formatted to begin with. If the CDATA[....] were properly formatted, it could be quite useful. I wonder if this is deliberate?

[John D'Orazio]

I find that Universalis might work somewhat for English only calendars; however, even though they "advertise" support for national calendars around the world, I see that such calendars are not translated into the languages of the relative countries, they are always in English.

And when I think of a national calendar, I think of the celebrations proper to that calendar as defined in the Roman Missal for that country. However, I am not seeing the correct national or wider region patron saint festivities in the Universalis national calendars. For example, Saint Francis of Assisi is a patron saint of Italy; however the national calendar for Italy is not only in English instead of in Italian, it also doesn't mention "patron saint of Italy" for Saint Francis: https://universalis.com/europe.italy/0/calendar.htm . It mentions Saint Benedict and Saint Bridget of Sweden as patrons of Europe; however it doesn't mention the other four patrons of Europe (Saints Cyril and Methodius, Edith Stein, Catherine of Siena). Saint Catherine of Siena is both patron of Italy and of Europe; for the national calendar of Italy she should show as both, for other national calendars in Europe she should show as patron of Europe.

I can only wonder how many other inconsistencies there are in the Universalis calendars. Which is the whole reason I set out to create the LitCal project. I wanted a project that would have precise and consistent data for each national calendar, based on the Roman Missals printed for each nation. I also wanted data that is historically correct (at least, as much as is reasonably possible). So that a calendar requested for any given year in the past should reflect pretty much how the calendar was in that year, not how it is today. I don't think any other project does this or takes this into account.

Most liturgical calendar projects, in order to attract people, will publish as many national calendars as they can, making it look like they've done a lot of work and research; however then when you start looking into it, you start to find all the inconsistencies. I have decided to not publish calendars for which I do not have the exact data. If you like at the US calendar on the LitCal project, you will find celebrations such as the National Day of Prayer for the Unborn (or more precisely, "Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children"), which was defined in the 2011 Roman Missal for the USA. You won't find that anywhere in the Universalis calendars. So their calendar data is not based on the Roman Missals. I hate to say, but it seems to be based on guesswork :O .

I think having the daily readings can be useful, but it's not the most important thing on a website; however having at least the correct liturgical events for any given day can be useful. And being able to have the correct data for a given diocese is, in my opinion, a bingo for a diocesan website. You can have for example the dedication of the cathedral for that diocese baked into the liturgical calendar feed that the diocesan website consumes. Some dioceses even override certain national liturgical options, for example I am told that in Boston Epiphany is celebrated on January 6th rather than on the Sunday between Jan. 2 and Jan. 8, and Ascension and Corpus Christi are celebrated on Thursday rather than on Sunday. I don't know of any liturgical calendar project that will handle such situations. Perhaps you could consider looking into LitCal?

https://litcal.johnromanodorazio.com/

https://github.com/Liturgical-Calendar