Behind the scenes: University of Tartu

Migrating from proprietary CMS to Drupal 7

René Lasseron

18 emp1 internSince 2000

3 500 emp17 000 studSince 1632

Before we started

• 80+ multilingual sites

• Funky navigation scheme

• All on one platformAutomatweb CMS

• Lack of support for the CMS

After we finished the first phase

• New navigation

• Fresh graphics

• Main site with 4 languages on Drupal 7

• 70+ sites still waiting for migration

www.ut.ee

Scale and scope

• 80+ sites on one Drupal installation

- One main site www.ut.ee

- Other sites for Faculties, Institutes, Colleges, other bodies

- Takes about year and half to migrate all of them

- Each having 4..2 language versions

• 300 daily content editors

- One main, central administrator

- 50 editors for main site

- 250 for other sites

• 28 000 nodes on main site

• Integrations with 8 backend systems

Login

• Username/password against university’s central LDAP, combined with web service

• Estonian ID-card and mobile-ID

User interface

• Workbench

• Most features hidden from daily editors

• Few content types

Workbench

User interfaceRe-worked tabs

• Add new sub-page

• Menu and parent menu element gets created automatically

User interfaceRe-worked tabs

• Add new nodes of different content types to the page

• Creates automatic relations using node reference

User interfaceRe-worked tabs

User interfaceRe-worked tabs

Main node, defining the menuChild node, shown via view and node reference

330 modules

• Domain Access

• Internalization

• Display Suite

• Feeds

• Webform

• CKeditorIMCE

• Media

• Linkit

• Autosave

• Content locking

• Link checker

• Transliteration

• Views (28)

• Context (5)

• Panel (mostly front page)

• Features (11)

• Google CSE

• Simple ads

“There’s a module for that”

Custom modules

• Trash

• Visually impaired

• Content reminder

• UT title italics

• UTTV.ee media support

• User bulk operations

Custom modules

• Trash

• Visually impaired•

• Content reminder

• UT title italics

• UTTV.ee media support

• User bulk operations

Custom modules

• Trash

• Visually impaired

• Content reminder

•

•

• UT title italics

• UTTV.ee media support

• User bulk operations

Custom modules

• Trash

• Visually impaired

• Content reminder

• UT title italics

• UTTV.ee Media support

• User bulk operations

• Estonian ID-card and mobile-ID support

We are working on publishing these on drupal.org

Visitor’s interface

• Omega theme

- http://drupal.org/project/omega

• 960.gs grid

• Nice Primary region feature

• HTML5/CSS3

• Mobile adaptive

• One template for all sub-sites, modified CSS

What we struggled with

• Generally trying to create “structure” in Drupal

• Showing right stuff on breadcrumbs

• Showing right stuff on menus

- Menu position http://drupal.org/project/menu_position

• Menu structure based user access

- Failed with Workbech Access

- Waiting for first release of Access

• Domain Access needs gentle handling

• Does it all play nice with 80+ sites?

• Bugs, patches and patching of modules

• Migration!

Deployment and performance

• Development, test and live sites

• Kept in sync with Features, Git

• One live server

• Boost module

• Yslow and Google Page speed recommendations

Who did it and what’s next

• Professional customer

• Mekaia: 1 Project manager, 2 backend programmers, 1 front-end coder

• Graphics design: Velvet

• IA: Kristjan Jansen

• Tools such as Git, Asana, Jira, Liquid planner, Harvest, Google Docs

• Pushing the limits with 70 additional sites

• SEO enhancements

• Contributing to drupal.org

René Lasseron

http://mekaia.com

rene@mekaia.com