Our Drupal installation went live on March 29. Drupal is replacing a web content management system called Bluenog. I made a determination when I began at Wellesley that this is yet another technology where we had to make a decision on what is best for us. The choice was either to stick with Bluenog and adapt ourselves and our needs to what the product demands or find a solution that better matches our needs. No single technology ever matches ALL of our needs, so the criteria was to choose something that covers MOST of our needs. We took a look at whether the current CMS is satisfying the needs of the College and it became apparent that in many areas, which I won’t go into detail here, we were struggling.

I had gone through the same exercise at Wesleyan and Pace in the recent past. At Wesleyan, we were very close to going with Drupal, except, it was not as mature four years ago as it is now. To the disappointment of a few open source fans, we chose a product called Cascade, which is still in use there. At Pace, the product in use was Hot Banana (I have no idea how they pick these names) which everyone was struggling with. Once, the product failed and the site was down. We called support in Canada and we were told that we will receive help for the next 10 minutes and if problem cannot be solved by then, we have to wait for the next morning! And at exactly 5 PM their time, the person said bye and hung up the phone! There was no Hot Banana “community” to seek help from. Thankfully, the company announced that they are stopping further development on Hot Banana (it generally means – “it is being put on life support and is being prepared for a slow death”). We looked at Drupal, WordPress and Joomla  and after a careful evaluation, chose Drupal.

I used that evaluation as the basis for recommending that we move to Drupal for Wellesley. I should say that we received support from almost all quarters fairly quickly. We then began an implementation plan.

Just as we made the decision to go with Drupal, many installations were struggling to decide whether to move to Drupal 7 which has been released fairly recently. Secondly, for the type of access control that we wanted in place, we could not simply go with Drupal’s own access control model, which is pretty liberal and open. Amherst College had developed a comprehensive access control on top of Drupal called the Monster Menus, which, Middlebury College has also adopted. It was well tested and ready for Drupal 6, but not yet ready for Drupal 7. They were planning to port it during the summer of 2011.

Our visit to Amherst was extremely useful and we got a lot out of it including the recommendation that we wait until July and implement Drupal 7 instead of Drupal 6. We took that advice and began planning the transition. Our original plans to do the implementation in August did not work out for many reasons – we ourselves were stretched too thin with other projects going on, and the we received recommendations that we do not add to the pain of transition to Google with yet another transition for academic department websites, & a new website design was shaping up around the same time. So, we took the time to implement and learn the ropes while our programmers worked very hard to develop systems to transfer data from Bluenog and yet another system called Charlotte.

We moved a few academic departments in late Nov/early December. But, like with any transition, we wanted to take this opportunity to also clean up, which took some time to accomplish. Then, one of our programmers came up with a brilliant set of tools to automate the transfer of content from Bluenog and 25Live, our space reservation system. This was critical for the success of the project! In the meantime, the collaboration between Public Affairs and LTS was in full swing, with many of the LTS staff whose jobs really didn’t call for participation in an effort like this rose up to the occasion and worked very hard to make it all happen.

This was truly an excellent collaboration and a job well done! My take on this is that participants felt empowered by the tools available to them – there was a much clearer understanding of what and how these things worked and besides, we were under full control. We did not have to create a help ticket and wait for someone to answer or the blackboxing that happens with vendor supported tools where “We took care of it” is the typical answer rather than telling us clearly what the issue was.

This is clearly yet another major project where we have demonstrated that if we all come together, plan well, collaborate well, keep a sense of humor about it and above all enjoy what one does, we can scale pretty much any difficult task. Everyone worked very hard, sometimes late in the evenings and nights. I greatly appreciate this effort. The fact that at 2 PM last thursday we flipped the switch and everything worked and continued to work, with one minor glitch which was corrected by Friday morning, must be very fulfilling to all involved.

We still have work to do but the important thing is that we have done the major part and everything else that follows should be relatively simple. Now that our community has seen what is possible, everyone else wants their sites moved asap. In fact on Friday we received a few calls as to why we have not moved their sites yet. This is a good thing!