We have currently paused all our migrations from EdWeb to our new Web Publishing Platform (WPP) in order to concentrate on critical development of the platform. We are working on our rescheduling process and timeline of how and when we’ll share this with our site lead publishers.

Executive summary

• Critical development for the platform and hosting environment expected to continue to November 2023
• Migration to restart in November 2023
• Migration sites to be split into groups
• Schedule for Group 1 sites (sites migrating first in November) to be contacted in June 2023 at the latest
• Schedule for Group 2 sites (sites migrating in 2024) to be contacted in August 2023 at the latest
• Options appraisal for supporting EdWeb after Drupal 7 reaches end of life on 1 November 2023.

Rescheduling process

We are currently in the process of rescheduling all the remaining sites in EdWeb. Sites will be split into two groups with smaller sites being migrated first to give us time to work on our migration scripts and get them running more efficiently.

New time slot proposals

We’ll try to contact lead publishers with at least 5 months notice of a new proposed date for the site migration. The proposed date can be changed if there are business critical reasons for doing this.

In June we’ll start to contact the first group of lead publishers of EdWeb sites who we are proposing to migrate in November. Followed up in August for the rest of the sites. All of the sites in the second group will be migrating in 2024.

Training and support

Training is currently paused and we are now working on a comprehensive training package which will be available later in the year for lead publishers and their teams who are migrating in November.

Lead publishers – what you need to do now

Read the blog posts on how we are introducing a new mega menu and why. Try out the mega menu visualisation tool on your site to see how the menu might look after the migration and how you might want to change wording or rethink menu priorities.

And wait for us contacting you in June for your proposed new migration slot for sites migrating in November. For sites migrating in 2024 we’ll be in contact with your proposed slot in August.

Additional reading

Implementing and evolving a megamenu in the Web Publishing Platform

From left-hand menus to megamenus – our visualisation tool

Revisiting our Information Architecture Guidelines

Supporting EdWeb and Drupal 7 after November 2023

EdWeb uses Drupal version 7 which reaches its end of life on 1 November 2023. As we are now proposing to finish the migration after this date an  options appraisal and impact assessment will need to be carried out as soon as possible. We are already in talks with a digital agency to provide support but we’ll need to investigate further what part of EdWeb and Drupal 7 they can or cannot support. We may have to look at more than one support mechanism.