After a really, really good run for a piece of software, Drupal 7 is entering its final 18 months here at UNL.
The Digital Experience Group has closely monitored the maturation of the Drupal codebase as it progressed through subsequent versions — version 8 was a complete rewrite and necessitated a rewrite of all modules in the Drupal ecosystem — and we’re now ready to move on to the next generation Drupal platform.
We considered other platforms over the past decade, but the correctness of the university’s choice of Drupal in 2011 has been reconfirmed repeatedly in the years since. Today, Drupal is the centrally supported content management platform at eight of the 14 Big Ten institutions. Its open nature provides opportunities for collaborative development within the UNL web community, and where it makes sense, with B1G and other R1 schools.
The move to a new Drupal foundation is about a lot more than a version number, however. The next-generation platform represents a huge leap in ease of use for UNL content providers and web developers.
Users will see the following improvements in the next-gen CMS service offering:
- Low-Code or No-Code web authoring experience
- with accessibility and validity built in
- with accessibility and validity built in
- Pre-built components and starter pages
- Drag and drop layout experience
- Automated image sizing/compression
- Power-user features for advanced developers
The timeline for the Next-Generation UNL CMS is as follows (all dates are those of our monthly Web Developer Network meetings):
February 14: First site in production
March 14: Components, roles and permissions
April 11: Closed beta to WDN Gov Board members
May 9: Starter Pages
June 13: Open availability
Drupal 7 will continue running at UNL until September 2024 to provide the community time to transition sites to the next generation of UNL CMS.
More details at: https://wdn.unl.edu