Behind the scenes: University of Tartu - Migrating from proprietary CMS to Drupal 7

1. Behind the scenes:
UniversityofTartu
Migrating from proprietary CMS to Drupal 7
René Lasseron

2. 18 emp
1 intern
Since 2000
3 500 emp
17 000 stud
Since 1632

3. Before we started
• 80+ multilingual
sites
• Funky navigation
scheme
• All on one platform
Automatweb CMS
• Lack of support for
the CMS

4. After we finished the first phase
• New navigation
• Fresh graphics
• Main site with 4
languages on
Drupal 7
• 70+ sites still waiting
for migration
www.ut.ee

5. Scale and scope
• 80+ sites on one Drupal
installation
- One main site www.ut.ee
- Other sites for Faculties, Institutes,
Colleges, other bodies
- Takes about year and half to migrate
all of them
- Each having 4..2 language versions
• 300 daily content
editors
- One main, central administrator
- 50 editors for main site
- 250 for other sites
• 28 000 nodes on main
site
• Integrations with
8 backend systems

6. Login
• Username/password
against university’s
central LDAP,
combined with web
service
• Estonian ID-card
and mobile-ID

7. User interface
• Workbench
• Most features
hidden from daily
editors
• Few content types
Workbench

8. User interface
Re-worked tabs
• Add new sub-page
• Menu and parent menu element gets created automatically

9. User interface
Re-worked tabs
• Add new nodes of different content types to the page
• Creates automatic relations using node reference

10. User interface
Re-worked tabs

11. User interface
Re-worked tabs
Main node, defining the menu
Child
node,
shown via
view and
node
reference

12. 330 modules
• Domain Access
• Internalization
• Display Suite
• Feeds
• Webform
• CKeditor
IMCE
• Media
• Linkit
• Autosave
• Content
locking
• Link checker
• Transliteration
• Views (28)
• Context (5)
• Panel
(mostly front page)
• Features (11)
• Google CSE
• Simple ads
“There’s a module for that”

13. Custom modules
• Trash
• Visually impaired
• Content reminder
• UT title italics
• UTTV.ee media
support
• User bulk
operations

14. Custom modules
• Trash
• Visually impaired
•
• Content reminder
• UT title italics
• UTTV.ee media
support
• User bulk
operations

15. Custom modules
• Trash
• Visually impaired
• Content reminder
•
•
• UT title italics
• UTTV.ee media
support
• User bulk
operations

16. Custom modules
• Trash
• Visually impaired
• Content reminder
• UT title italics
• UTTV.ee Media
support
• User bulk
operations
• Estonian ID-card and
mobile-ID support
We are working on
publishing these on
drupal.org

17. Visitor’s interface
• Omega theme
- http://drupal.org/project/omega
• 960.gs grid
• Nice Primary region
feature
• HTML5/CSS3
• Mobile adaptive
• One template for all
sub-sites, modified CSS

18. What we struggled with
• Generally trying to create
“structure” in Drupal
• Showing right stuff on
breadcrumbs
• Showing right stuff on
menus
- Menu position http://drupal.org/project/
menu_position
• Menu structure based user
access
- Failed with Workbech Access
- Waiting for first release of Access
• Domain Access needs
gentle handling
• Does it all play nice with
80+ sites?
• Bugs, patches and patching
of modules
• Migration!

19. Deployment and performance
• Development, test and
live sites
• Kept in sync with
Features, Git
• One live server
• Boost module
• Yslow and Google Page
speed recommendations

20. Who did it and what’s next
• Professional customer
• Mekaia: 1 Project
manager, 2 backend
programmers, 1 front-
end coder
• Graphics design:Velvet
• IA: Kristjan Jansen
• Tools such as Git,Asana,
Jira, Liquid planner,
Harvest, Google Docs
• Pushing the limits with
70 additional sites
• SEO enhancements
• Contributing to
drupal.org

21. René Lasseron
http://mekaia.com
rene@mekaia.com