Joinup platform back online: most of the bugs are fixed

If you are reading this, then we're back online! That means that our technicians have succeeded and on Monday have applied patches to our collaboration platform. For a little over one month, Joinup was plagued by many serious bugs. Software solutions could not be downloaded, some project pages became hard to navigate, and the update also damaged certain types of content. At times the system became excruciatingly slow.

We're happy to report that, as of yesterday, most of the bugs have been fixed, thanks to this Monday's update.

First of all, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience that we have caused you. We realise that we have tested your patience.

The Joinup platform is a tailored version of the Drupal content management framework (version 6). On Thursday 10 April, we rolled-out a new version, 1.6, bringing big changes, including the handling of metadata and an overhaul of the site's lay-out.

Joinup 1.6 implements the so-called ADMS Application Profile (ADMS-AP). It provides a standard method to structure code classifications, taxonomies and other specialised vocabularies of re-usable metadata. It makes it possible to extend the classification to interoperability solutions that cover the political, legal, organisational and technical interoperability layers defined by the European Interoperability Framework.

We also changed from a three- to a two-column layout, resulting in more space for the platform's main content. And we updated the HTML editor.

No rollback

Immediately following the update, we started noticing problems. However, rolling back to the previous version of software and database was not really an option, as some of the communities had to start using the AMDS-AP.

Some of the bugs were really hard to fix. We discovered that our development, testing and production environments differed ever so subtly. The platform is developed and tested on hosts that are outside the European Commission datacentre in Luxembourg, where we manage the production servers. Although all three use the same software, a tiny difference in the install location of some software libraries caused a major delay in loading times and database queries. Fixing it was easy, but it took a lot of time to track down.

We've improved the procedures for testing and deployment, to make sure that this won't affect us again.

A few minor errors still exist, however, and we hope to fix these with the next maintenance update, in two weeks' time.

Patience

Over the past five weeks, many Joinup users reported problems and bugs. Thanks to everyone for taking the trouble, and for helping us make a better platform. Again, thanks for your support and patience. We hope to now provide you with a much better, consistent service!

The Joinup Team