Drupal for EDU: How Three Universities are Doing More with Drupal (+Pantheon)

If content management systems were toys, Drupal would be Lego. It’s infinitely customizable. If you can dream it, you can build it. The one downside? You have to put it together brick by brick.

Drupal can be an ideal CMS for university websites. In addition to the customizability, it excels at managing complex content ecosystems. Content like, say, a main university page with dozens of department pages, student life pages, all with multiple content types interacting in multiple ways.

Despite how well-suited Drupal is for EDU, getting started with it can seem daunting. Drupal does require technical savvy and time and money for development—all of which are precious resources for a university.

With a little investment and the right partners, however, universities can create amazing online destinations with Drupal. Here are a few inspiring stories of institutions that leveled up their web presence by upgrading their CMS.

Arizona State University Builds a Custom Upstream for over 2,000 Sites

How would you manage over 2,000 sites under a single IT department? Keeping all the sites up and running, handling support requests, and dealing with security risks kept the IT team at Arizona State University (ASU) busy.

The team wanted to standardize on Drupal, but ran into difficulties with their less tech-savvy staff. “Drupal was too complex for a non-developer to maintain,” says Daniel Garcia-Mont, Director of Information Technology Services. “People would switch over to another CMS and then their site would get hacked.”

To address the problem, the team built a custom Drupal distribution on Pantheon, called Open ASU. Having a standardized upstream makes it easy to build a responsive, ASU-branded site without being an expert user.  

The new sites are stable and easily-updatable by design, ensuring that each site will always have the latest security patches. “Now, we maintain the distribution,” says Garcia-Mont. “You just make one click through the Pantheon dashboard and you’re up to date.”

Read ASU’s full story.

The University of Texas Builds a Modern Destination for a Century-Old Alumni Association

The University of Texas (UT) Alumni Association, known as the “Texas Exes,” have been around for over 100 years. Their website, texasexes.org, is the new modern hangout for the association’s thousands of members. They use the site to discuss UT news, network, and most importantly for the association, make donations.

The site’s infrastructure was beginning to show its age—not a hundred years, but at least a decade or two—and the Texas Exes team needed to find a new solution. The site needed to support thousands of simultaneous users, and needed hosting elastic enough to handle major traffic spikes.

The team partnered with web design firm Four Kitchens to build a new site that could meet their evolving needs. The team built a Drupal site on Pantheon, using Pantheon’s built-in workflow to standardize the development process.

With a new, more responsive site in place, Texas Exes are moving ahead with big plans to bring even more value to their alumni. “We can focus more on content and less on web administration,” he says. “We are a leader in the space; we like to show off great-looking content, graphics, and visuals. We can do that on Pantheon.”

Read UT’s full story.

The University of Nevada Las Vegas Rocks a Presidential Debate with Scalable Hosting

Imagine the embarrassment if your site went down when the whole world was watching. That’s the situation the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) desperately needed to avoid. The university was chosen to host the final presidential debate in 2016; an event that would certainly bring unprecedented amounts of traffic to their site.

In the UNLV’s case, the site architecture was fine, built on Drupal and capable of handling thousands of simultaneous users. But the platform the site was hosted on wasn’t up to the task. It was running on a local server in a building on campus. Not only could the server not handle an increased traffic load, it was also vulnerable to attacks.

The team at the UNLV evaluated new hosting platforms as the debate deadline loomed, eventually settling on Pantheon because of their specialization in higher education. With Pantheon’s help, the UNLV migrated the site in time for the debate. During the debate, the site stayed responsive even with an exponential increase in traffic.

Read the UNLV’s full story.

Is Your Website Ready to Graduate?

With its high degree of customizability, capacity to scale, and adeptness at handling multiple content types, Drupal is a great choice for EDU websites. As these stories show, universities can adopt Drupal without having hundreds of skilled developers at the ready.

Drupal works for EDU—and Drupal works best on Pantheon. The platform’s development tools, Multidev environment, support, and security features make Pantheon a perfect fit for higher education.

Learn more about Pantheon for EDU.