CU-Boulder's Journey into Drupal

Over the past few years, the University of Colorado Boulder has been adopting Drupal in a fairly organic process. However, University Communications and the Office of Information Technology are jointly building an enterprise class Drupal web platform for websites throughout the entire campus. We're thrilled to be able to offer Drupal as a service to the campus - making it easier for our campus faculty, professors, students, and alumni to build and interact with complex, functional websites. In January of 2012, we launched the most visible change, a new homepage for colorado.edu. Over the coming months leading up to DrupalCon we're going to be expanding the system by bringing more sites online. By then we'll have all our kinks worked out, and we'll be able to share our successes and failures. This will be a panel discussion run by a handful of the key members of the team. We'll cover a wide range of topics:
  • Getting the initial funding
  • Building the stack - F5, Varnish, Memcache, Apache, PHP, MySql
  • Nuts and bolts of Enterprise Class
  • Drupal site building
  • Design process and theming
  • Training our faculty and staff
  • Spreading the word around campus
We won't have time to go in to every detail, but we'll go as far as we can. It's been a year long project that's going to be well worth the wait. We're excited to share some of what we've been working on, but we also know that we've only scratched the surface. This project is going to change over time, and we're adapting everyday. We'll try to give a glimpse of where this could go in the future. We're from Boulder, Colorado and we're looking forward to having DrupalCon Denver in our own backyard. We're honored to be allowed to share our story to the community.
Time slot: 
Wednesday 3:45pm-4:45pm
Track: 
Nonprofit, Government & Education
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Questions answered by this session: 
Why did CU choose Drupal?
How long and what does it really take to go from initial idea to launch?
Technically, what was involved in this project? Hardware, software?
What are some of the specifics of your deployment strategy? How do you roll out maintenance updates and new features?
What’s the basis of the Drupal site structure? What content types, views, modules used, etc?
Colorado mountains