A little more than 600 days ago, in April of 2023, we announced through the UNL Web Developer Network and in Nebraska Today that we’d need all university websites to be off of Drupal 7 and on the newest version of Drupal by December of 2024.
What made that necessary was the announcement from the Drupal Project that the venerable version 7 would reach its end of life on Jan. 5, 2025. Whatever its limitations in terms of state of the art content management for the web, version 7 had served us well for more than a decade, and we were used to it. The grass in the newest versions of Drupal was definitely greener — with an emerging and fairly robust Layout Builder that could accommodate the design patterns of the UNL Web Framework inside of an authoring environment that would no longer require coding expertise on the part of people who build most web pages. But … and this is where this all became a Tall Order … there was no ‘easy button’ to migrate all of those painstakingly-coded web pages and content to a new system based on a new no-code paradigm. It would all have to be rebuilt. In a lean university, it’s not comfortable or easy to make that ask.
It’s not easy or comfortable to say “yes” to that ask, either. But you all pulled up your Husker sleeves anyway and got to work, and today we have nearly 400 sites live in the Next-Gen CMS. Over 70 have gone live in just the last month, and by this time next week, over 100 more will have joined them. Many of you have provided bug reports, or shared tips and tricks with others in our WDN chat channels, or even contributed code to be integrated into the system. All while rebuilding your own sites and along the way reorganizing them and giving them a new shine. Whew!
On Dec. 19, our administrators will finally spin down the old Drupal 7 system. They say that it won’t make a sound like this, which is pretty disappointing.
We’ll make a backup of the old CMS as we take it offline, but while it’s still out there, please go and pull anything off of it you might need. Most of your old sites are in maintenance mode in that system until it is removed from the network.
In 2025, the slate is clean to continue building new communication capabilities into UNL CMS (when there’s one CMS, again, we’ll just call it UNL CMS), add syndicated content where it makes sense to ContentHub*, and work toward the summer where we’ll introduced a refreshed UNL Framework** and integrate it into the CMS. This time, we don’t expect you to have to do anything, other than critique the coming changes as they're presented to the WDN.
So thank you to each and every one of you, as we all look forward to a peaceful holiday break.
UComm Digital Experience Group and the WDN Shared Governance Board
Bob, Ryan, Aaron, Eric, Saron, Tommy and Clay and Becky, Anne, Matt, Mike, Yahya, and David
*ContentHub is currently most famous as the enabler of syndicated content for promoting our majors and programs … in 2025, other content will be considered for similar treatment.
** The UNL Framework is the design system and supporting code that gives our websites and web apps a strong and consistent look and feel. And just for one more opportunity to say thanks … more than three years after our community-wide effort to support Dark Mode, we are still the only major university to do so. It matters: around a third of all users site-wide prefer to visit our sites in Dark Mode … including more than half of prospective students.
More details at: https://wdn.unl.edu