Fall 2015 Drupal update

The work on the Drupal infrastructure and templates continues … here’s a quick update:

You already know that the UVM homepage and subsequent main overview pages are in Drupal, but we now have two other major sites under our belts — the Undergraduate Admissions site as well as the Honors College. Here’s our plan for the coming months:

I. Interface improvements
Because the way people will work in this system is completely different from the way they work in the current UVM publishing system, there’s a good amount of work to be done on the user interface. We need to know that it’s intuitive to use — and fix things to be more so — before we release to the UVM community.

II. Creation of online documentation
Remember the Web Guide? Well we need a new one for Drupal. Users will have questions, and there aren’t enough of us to go around to answer each and every one of them on the phone or via email. So we’re building a new repository of “How to work in Drupal for UVM users” info.

III. Completion of templates for the larger community
The admissions template we created was custom, and the Honors College used the one college template that we have created so far. We are now building the academic and administrative department templates that the majority of webmasters will use.

IV. Plans for training the UVM community
Planning, planning, planning. This has been a huge component of the Drupal project. And with a bare bones work crew, it takes a fair amount of our time. We appreciate the patience you’ve had, and also the enthusiasm. Many people have reached out about the timeline. When the above items on our to-do list are complete, we will start holding some training sessions so that people can begin building his/her unit’s website. We expect that when that happens, the project will pick up speed pretty quickly. We are expecting to start training by the end of the semester (not everyone will train at once) — and you can look for an update on those plans in the next couple months. And remember–preparing your content and pairing down your main menu is still the best way you can prepare for the migration into Drupal. We’ll take care of the design. We’re looking forward to working with all of you as this project continues to move forward.

Best wishes,
UVM Web Team