CU-Boulder: What we have and what we're creating

The University of Colorado Boulder is attempting to standardize on Drupal. Two departments, Office of Information Technology and University Communications are joined at the hip, moving towards some sort of Drupal utopia where anybody on campus can create a functional Drupal site with the click of the mouse.

CU-Boulder has thousands of "individual" websites, intertwined in a mess of subdomains and paths on our primary domain. Attempting to standardize on Drupal is no easy task. With countless colleges, departments, research centers, student groups, faculty members... all needing some sort of presence on the web, finding a solution to all of their needs takes a lot of man power and a lot of code.

Over the last few years, the University has launched nearly 100 Drupal sites, most of which share a single installation profile. We're in the midst of creating a platform to sustain the rapid growth of Drupal on campus.

This session will walk you through our infrastructure, the environments we have set up, the caching layers (varnish and memcache), how our jenkins deployments are configured, and our git repository and file directory structure - using our contributed Drush Symlink Manager (DSLM), as well as several of the installation profile's features. After describing what we have, I'll give a glimpse inside what we're building this summer.

This session is not meant to be highly technical - I'm not going to show too much code, rather my hope is that you'll walk alway with an insiders look at what it takes to run a University's web platform on Drupal.

Download Slides (pdf)

Audience
Track: 
Development and Site Building
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Speaker(s): 
ultimateboy
Groups audience: