The University’s new Drupal-based central website has been recognised by the Scottish Drupal community, winning the Best Public/Not for profit Drupal website category in the Scottish Drupal Awards 2015.

The award submission was made jointly between the University Website Programme and Information Services Application division, on behalf of the whole team and all those who have supported the EdWeb project around the University.

The challenge:

To build a new Content Management System (CMS) to run the vast and diverse University of Edinburgh website.

Key requirements:

• easy to use – to enable efficient day to day website updates, saving time in website maintenance and training for the hundreds of website editors within the University
• no disruption to University business – during the migration of over 50,000 published pages from the old CMS into the new one
• flexible options – a centrally managed CMS while also allowing business units to take the CMS and customise it for their own local needs
• innovative – to encourage innovation and utilise technical expertise around the University
• reputation – to raise the University’s profile on an international level.
• responsive – all content throughout the site, to be responsive, offering equivalent high-level of user experience across all devices

Why Drupal?

In the award submission we wanted to highlight what the challenges had been for us and how we had used Drupal to solve some of these.

How Drupal solved the challenge

Using Drupal allowed us to quickly build a working CMS tailored to the University’s web publishing needs. It formed the basis of our centrally-run service which provides the support many of our users need. Many of the Drupal modules provide a better user experience overall and make a lot of tasks quicker and easier compared to our old system.

However Drupal also allowed us to create a distribution profile which supplied the flexibility needed to meet the diverse business needs of a large University.

The results?

Feedback from our community of CMS users has been overwhelmingly positive:

“It’s generally pretty easy to use. It looks nice. It’s quicker to use than [our previous CMS] and, to me, much more logical.”

“That’s going to save me so much time”.

Drupal’s standing worldwide, supports the University’s aim to encourage innovation and raise its profile on an international level and there are plans to build on the code our developers have already submitted back to the Drupal community and integrate this more fully into our development process.

Facts and figures

• Over 400 users trained in the new system so far
• Length of training sessions reduced by over 25% as it’s so easy to use and intuitive
• Over 170 sites already live in the new CMS as well as keen take up of the distribution service
• All sites migrated are fully responsive and at the completion of the migration project the whole of the centrally-managed website will be responsive.

We’re delighted to receive this award from DrupalCamp Scotland and to have the achievements of the project celebrated in this way.

DrupalCamp Scotland

Who can change EdWeb? You!

DrupalCamp Scotland 2015 at the University