Managing over 500 Microsites in Drupal
Higher Education
Upgrade from Drupal 7 to 10
Complex multisite development
Background
Ranking 9th in the QS World University ratings and named the Times University of the Year 2024, University College London (UCL) is a powerhouse in leading higher education. UCL had a Drupal 7 multisite platform running over 500 microsites across the estate. This had become difficult to manage, with a lack of cohesion between platforms causing an inefficient user experience as well as a headache for the content management team.
The priority for UCL was not only the upgrade to Drupal 10, but also providing greater flexibility to their internal development and content teams to have maximum control over the multisite platform. In order to keep cost and time investment as low as possible, ensuring UCL would have the capability to manage the bulk of the move internally was of paramount importance.
The Solution
Custom Multisite Management Dashboard
The first game changer for UCL was the development of a custom dashboard that operated as a command centre for managing hundreds of microsites. This dashboard automatically syncs when changes are made to the microsite estate, ensuring that the UCL team have full ownership and view of the content across the multisite platform.
Global Design System
Each page includes best practices on content management, with a global template that allows users to clone an example page rather than create a new concept from scratch. In order to ensure this continuously evolves, Zoocha have also provided UCL with the ability to update the template to reflect the most recent example of best practice, ensuring that content editors remain consistent and appropriately reflecting the UCL brand.
Cohesive Content
With a large variety of departments and faculties requiring access to the platform and needing to share aspects of the functionality (menu, taxonomy etc), ensuring that certain areas of content would be locked and others open to flexibility was a critical success factor. Faculty editors are now able to login and make updates to their own content, whilst benefiting from the global functionality that helps maintain a cohesive experience with the UCL main platform.
New Microsite Development
In order to provide maximum control to the UCL team, Zoocha have enabled their in-house developers to quickly spin-up new microsites that can promote unique branding to each faculty or department that they represent. This process is fully configurable, allowing UCL to ensure content populated on each new page using a series of automated and manual content population techniques. This ability has been built to be achievable without requiring a devops or sysadmin intervention in order to launch.
Results
The UCL team are now able to quickly release new microsites in Drupal 10, leveraging pre-existing content and populating to flexible templates that prioritise accessibility and consistency with the wider UCL estate.
Central to the success of our work was hands-on project management and working as a true extension of the UCL team. UCL have benefited from significant long-term cost and resource savings through empowering their internal team.
Benefits have also extended beyond cost, with the UCL digital estate optimised for sustainability, with a far greater usage of platform storage due to the consolidation of microsite platforms.
Testimonial
University College London"The Zoocha team's collaborative and agile approach, their Drupal expertise and user-centric focus have delivered a CMS and a migration process that will bring huge value to UCL's digital teams and to our many audiences.”