Santa was very good to me. I received the Guggenheim Museum and the Women of NASA LEGO sets. So many little tiny pieces! However, the journey to completion will provide the most fun and probably some frustration.
Construction takes planning. The Women of NASA set has 231 pieces and the Guggenheim has 744 pieces and a 40-page guide! The first task is to sort the pieces by color and then by shape. Everything from that point starts with assembling the base and working my way up.
At the start of the UTC website work in 2018, we knew we had nearly 6,000 webpages composed of a plethora of content. Finding consistency across the sites was paramount to creating a streamlined migration.
The website refresh initiative was the impetus for organizing content into manageable pieces—and then sorting by category or type. As in LEGOs, we identified common blocks and the need for a solid platform on which the blocks will sit.
Building the UTC website in Drupal has been akin to building with LEGOs. The Web Team spent the last half of 2019 constructing the platform, building common and specialty blocks, tearing down structures that weren’t working quite right, and experimenting along the way to create an experience that will work best for all.
It wasn’t all fun, and there were points of frustration, but I’m happy to report that we have a stable platform in the Acquia Cloud on which to build. Between October and the end of December the three web developers have written 304,113 lines of code making 401 commits. So far, the content editors have created the following in Drupal:
- 22 news articles
- 4 landing pages
- 2 administrative home pages
- 6 administrative internal pages
- 1 faculty/staff contact page
- 1 demo home page
The student employees (our content editors) in Communications and Marketing were trained on using the Drupal editor in December. They will be working on the Office of Communications and Marketing and Office of the Chancellor sites over the next 2-3 weeks.
Towards the end of January, we will have a better idea of which sites will be done, in what order, and an estimated time period.
We are starting the new year optimistically with a plan to have the migration from OU Campus to Drupal completed by mid-2020. We hope we don’t end up with a lot of extra pieces.