Eighteen months and nearly 200 websites later, the Web communications team in the Division for University Advancement has migrated the majority of the campus’ websites into templates created for the Drupal content management system (CMS).
“This has been a campus-wide effort that began with the University’s leadership. Chancellor Dubois and the Cabinet endorsed the need for a unified solution to our website,” said Richard McDevitt, director of marketing. “ The goal was to implement a CMS to support the creation, management, delivery and sharing of Web content across colleges and departments at the University while also promoting compliance with standards for branding, accessibility and communications.”
To accomplish the Drupal migration, a Web Advisory Council (WAC) and a Web Executive Committee were created to guide the process. Input from council members, which represented a cross section of campus website managers, influenced many of the services implemented into the Drupal offering, such as standard pages, media management, analytics, news and events and paid/unpaid event registration.
“The Web migration project team worked with the WAC to inventory the University’s public-facing websites to develop an initial set of features that encompassed most Web content presentation needs,” stated Cindy Jones, Web communications manager. “As we worked through the phases of the migration, we continued to add to this list. For example, when we came to Block Five, we knew that alumni affairs needed to have an event registration system that integrated with Touchnet. The project team met with users to identify the requirements for the system, and our ITS colleagues were able to build this for us in Drupal.”
McDevitt noted the migration required the University to review its approach to website management, and the process has changed how ITS supports the Web, which will continue to evolve moving forward. “Not many institutions can accomplish such a project, so it is a major achievement for the chancellor, as well as the entire University.”
Plans are under way to present the University’s migration efforts as a case study at the eduWeb conference in Boston and the CASE conference in Atlanta.
The Web communications team will work with the roughly 250 site managers in ongoing support for the Drupal templates, which include two additional themes. The Office of University Communications will continue to coordinate how the Web and other aspects of electronic communications are utilized on campus in areas such as electronic publications, email and user-generated content, such as social media.