Office of Communications

Website Migration Update for Spring 2018

February 14, 2018

To: Faculty and Staff

As spring semester gets underway, the web team is beginning the final leg of the content migration from DotCMS to our new system, Drupal. This update will fill you in on our progress to date and our plans for the next three months. Moving forward, you’ll be able to find our latest progress report at go.oberlin.edu/web-updates, and we'll also provide links to each new report in the campus news digest email.

Following the launch of the new homepage, top-level overview pages, admissions sites, faculty bios, and news and events sections over the summer, we began migrating the college’s 66 administrative office websites, which include more than 2,000 pages and hundreds of downloadable files. We launched 18 office sites in the summer, 25 in the fall, and 13 so far in 2018, with 10 more underway.

Meanwhile, we've begun contacting academic departments and divisions about migrating their 50 sites to Drupal from DotCMS. We expect to begin launching some of the smaller sites within a few weeks, with the larger ones spread out over the next 3 months. As the site launches proceed, we will offer training to the department administrative assistants and any other employees who are involved in maintaining the pages.

We've also been busy on the technical front, adding features and fixing bugs as we go. If you haven't seen them yet, take a look at these pages and sections that were created after the initial launch:

Upcoming improvements and features will include some significant homepage tweaks for the admissions yield period, improved news segmentation, and better navigation functionality on interior pages.

A few data points illustrate the impact of this work:

  • Across all of our sites, traffic averages more than a half million pageviews per month
  • In May 2017 (before the launch), 68% of those pageviews were on the old DotCMS site (designed in 2008), with the rest spread out across six other platforms
  • By August, the DotCMS and Drupal sites were evenly split, each serving about 43% of all pageviews (with the rest on four platforms)
  • Last month, the Drupal site reached 70% of all pageviews, with DotCMS down to 21%
  • By the end of May we'll have 90% of our pageviews in Drupal, with the rest in four smaller systems (and zero in DotCMS!)

Finally, I want to thank you for your patience throughout this gigantic project. Thank you! And of course, please feel free to contact us with any questions.

Best regards,

Bill

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Bill Denneen
Director of Web Initiatives
Office of Communications
ext. 56218