A little over a year ago DrupalCamp New Jersey, I shared how the University of Colorado was shifting from a locked down CMS as a service model to leveraging Devops/Webops to empower Site Builders for some sites. That plan suffered a bit of a set back when CU abandoned their dreams of launching a 4th, online-only campus and the funding for my role with it.

I took this vision "down the street" to the University of Denver where we've transformed the way they've been managing Drupal in just 10 months. I will share some technical elements, but this session is more about how we moved as an organization from an approach to Drupal designed for Acquia Site Factory to leveraging everything Pantheon has to offer in a low code/no code configuration that looks more like Salesforce than how most of higher ed approaches Drupal.

  • We outsourced the work of retraining Developers AND Site Builders on what modern Drupal looks like "out of the box" to reset
  • We use a combination of environment based role assignment and the Config PR module to give Site Builders an option to export YML as a Pull Request within Drupal without ever using the command line or even logging into GitHub.
  • DU has adopted the old Microsoft approach of "embrace and extend" to customize each site on a common core install profile. This has greatly reduced the number of units "going rouge" to avoid the previous approach where every site had to be locked down to the point Subject Matter Experts were limited to what they can change in a WYSIWYG editor.
  • Not every aspect of this transition went well. I'll share a list of what I wish we did different that will hopefully save you some time if you decide to go this route.

 

 

 

Audience: All Track(s): Dev / DevOps, Site Building