One of the biggest IT and communications projects in UNL's history is almost complete! Underway since spring of 2023, the Next-Gen CMS Transition Project is moving UNL from a complex, code-heavy website system to a user-friendly, no-code authoring environment. This exciting change is happening across University Communication, Information Technology Services, and hundreds of offices university-wide.
Since 2011, when a web content management system was first brought to UNL by ITS and UComm, UNL.edu has been mainly on top of Drupal 7. UNL was an early mover to Drupal; it has since become the most widely-used enterprise content management system in large higher education, with over half of Big Ten institutions’ websites based on the software.
In the years since the version 7 release, Drupal has been rewritten completely. This separate codebase operated for many years alongside the continuously-maintained D7. The new codebase was fully mature by version 10, allowing the Drupal Project to announce an end of life for Drupal 7.
At UNL, Drupal 7 will enter its final shutdown process on Dec. 12.
Next-Gen CMS is based on Drupal 10 and its follow-on versions, which incorporate truly game-changing technology: the Layout Builder authoring environment.
Layout Builder allows communicators to build and maintain secure and accessible websites without requiring any coding knowledge; personnel in University Communication and contributors from the UNL Web Developer Network handle the coding, and communicators do the communicating. To date, over 300 sites have gone live in Next-Gen CMS since the first was launched in April 2023, with the pace quickening as the old environment nears the start of its shutdown phase on Dec. 12. Development of new features and refinements in Next-Gen CMS is concurrent and continuing, with a visual refresh slated for summer 2025.
UNL.edu is the largest and highest-traffic public website in Nebraska, serving more than 150 million pages annually. Audience for the site is concentrated in our own university community while UNL web pages are regularly requested from nearly every country in the world.
By The Numbers
- 36 Training Sessions (with nearly 700 participants) since June 2023
- 40 Pages of Documentation
- 1700+ commits to the code repositories
- 300+ live sites in Next-Gen CMS today
- 1000+ emails to specific site owners about specific sites, as well as hundreds of broad messages to the UNL web community as well as the UNL community at large
More details at: https://cms.unl.edu/