Building websites for universities and colleges comes with a unique set of challenges. Unlike most organizations, higher education institutions are not singular entities but constellations composed of faculties, institutes, departments, administrative units, and ad hoc entities and initiatives. Many of these distinct components have their own set of audiences and functional requirements as well as a shared need for brand uniformity.

Furthermore, a post-secondary institution’s web presence is as important as its campus grounds in terms of how the world perceives it, and its websites need to be up-to-date and modern-looking to compete effectively in the global marketplace.

Higher education websites also pose unique challenges from a content management standpoint. University and college websites typically have significant legacy content that needs to be carried over from previous sites. They also may have dozens or even hundreds of people, from instructors to support staff, who need to create and post content every semester – people who may have had minimal CMS training.

Add in budgetary constraints and timelines dictated by the rhythms of the academic year, and you have a recipe for a challenging environment in which to run digital projects.

Which CMS is Best for Higher Education?

In our work with universities and colleges across North America, Evolving Web has focused on two content management systems: Drupal and WordPress. As the CMS of choice for 71% of the world’s top 100 universities, Drupal is best suited to the complexities that often exist in the post-secondary context. We address how well Drupal is suited to higher education websites in this blog post.

Institutional websites like those used in higher education typically need robust and customizable search interfaces that can integrate third-party systems such as those used for course catalogues. They also often require a multi-site architecture and integration with third-party marketing and identity management tools. For such sites, Drupal is the clear choice for a CMS. Among its advantages are:

• Security 
• Composable solutions
• Out-of-the-box search engine optimization functionality
• Built-in functionality for content editing, search, user access, multilingualism and contact pages
• Design flexibility that gives authors quick page building and editing tools
• Ability to customize the integration of a wide range of third-party APIs including single sign-ons, course catalogues and more

However, for simpler sites with less robust current and future requirements, WordPress’ simplicity and ease of use are advantageous.

WordPress has block editing tools that enable users to easily create interesting content layouts. The CMS is intuitive for site authors and editors, and widely used, therefore requiring only minor training. 

Both platforms are open source, meaning that best practices tend to be shared amongst higher education institutions, which provides a huge advantage over proprietary options.

Have you Outgrown your CMS?

Institutions change. They expand, become more complex and outgrow their original digital homes. So what might have started as a simple site befitting WordPress might come to benefit from Drupal’s features. 

These are some signs that the CMS you are using might no longer be fit for the job you’re asking of it:

• You’ve reached a point where your technical maintainers cannot push the system further.
• Your site lacks accessibility or fails to hold up to increased SEO expectations. 
• You cannot update your content in real-time.
• You have form but lack functionality.
• You have functionality but lack form, leading to a lack of consistency and brand compliance.

How To Get The Most Out of Your CMS

Higher education institutions ask a lot from their content management systems. Your typical university or college website is an amalgam of new and archival content aimed at a wide range of audiences – current and prospective students, faculty and staff, administrators, alumni, donors and others – and often maintained by a large team of content creators.

Higher education CMSs are liable to get messy quickly unless the right structures are established at the start.

At Evolving Web, we build websites with the expectation that they will continue to be relevant for years after they launch. The philosophy is that the client team will have the ability and tools to update the content and structure as needed throughout the website’s lifecycle. However, most websites don’t last that long, with research showing that the average site lasts around two years and seven months according to Orbit Media. Whether or not your site outlives this average depends on the robustness of the original design and whether it’s set up in a sustainable way.

Optimization Strategies

Here are six strategies that higher education institutions can use to get the most out of their CMS and ensure the longest possible lifespan for their investment:

1. Have a short- and long-term management and maintenance plan for keeping information current and relevant. Planning a content strategy in parallel with the site solution is an invaluable investment of time and energy. Crafting a digital marketing and communications strategy that encompasses the web and other digital tools can help outline roles and responsibilities and organize the types and categories of new content. For more on this, read our blog post on content governance.
2. Involve the people who will be using your website early on in the process. The people who will be updating and using the site should be involved in the conversations on design and user experience right from the start. In addition to empowering them early on with knowledge of the CMS, it will also give the web management team a sense of ownership and encourage sound management of web resources.
3. Ensure your software is always up to date. Falling behind on CMS upgrades means guaranteed headaches down the road, costing organizations time and money. Regular updates will keep your site safe, secure and running smoothly.
4. Minimize custom code. The flexibility of Drupal, in particular, means little need for custom coding. As a rule, the most customization you put into a site, the harder it becomes to maintain. If you require customization, it is advisable to turn to the original developer rather than to improve an in-house solution that will make the CMS more complex.
5. Ensure that content is properly and consistently tagged. Universities and colleges have a wide range of audiences, and these audiences have particular content needs. A failure to properly categorize content within the CMS through tagging is a guaranteed path to a messy site that fails to deliver content to its intended audience. It also limits your options for creating dynamic search and personalization features in the future.
6. Hire a team that is reputed to deliver quality solutions. Since 2007, Evolving Web has helped organizations big and small unlock the full potential of their content management system. This includes many higher education institutions, including Princeton, Emory, McGill, Waterloo and many others. 

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Let us quickly guide you through the essential basics of risk management to keep you prepared for choosing the best strategy for the fluctuating times.

Last week I visited the city of Prague to attend the European DrupalCon 2022. The even was held between September 20th and 23rd, and was attended by over 1,200 people.

This was my first physical conference since DrupalCamp London 2020, and the first DrupalCon I have attended since DrupalCon Dublin 2016. Despite the worries about covid I was still pretty exited to attend the event. I arrived on Monday night and as the event didn't start properly until Tuesday afternoon it gave me a small chance to explore the city of Prague before the conference started.

There were so many talks, sessions, meetings, and events during DrupalCon that I could write for pages and pages about the conference. I am quite sure, however, that no one would actually read all of that I'll just post a couple of highlights from each day and provide a sum up at the end.

Tuesday

After the initial welcoming talk the conference started with an introduction to some of the initiatives that are being worked on at the moment, each one introduced by a member of the initiative team. The initiatives discussed where CKEditor 5, project browser, project update bot, GitLab integration, localize.drupal.org, distributions and recipes, and automatic updates.

Read more.

If you look over this blog, or know me, you will see that I’ve now have reasonably significant experience as both a Salesforce and Drupal developer. The last couple weeks I have been thing about what from my Drupal experience supports my work as a Salesforce developer.

I think there are three parallels that are encouraged in Drupal developers that helped me learn to be a good Salesforce developer quickly.

1. Embrace, don’t fight, Platform Constraints
2. Extend the Platform’s Strengths
3. Leverage Events

Embrace Salesforce Platform Constraints

Both Drupal and Salesforce run in constrained environments. Web applications, regardless of their purpose, have to protect themselves against bad actors and bad neighbors. There are execution timeouts and memory limits, for both platforms. Salesforce adds a variety of additional limits and governors, but they are all logical extensions about memory and time. Lots of other platforms allow developers to ignore resource use until they reach a crisis point. Don’t believe me, just check the memory used by Chrome, Electron Apps, or any other Chromium-based application.

Working in resource constrained environments forces you to think through how to use the resources you do have efficiently. While these platforms aren’t like working on hardware with highly limited resources, they still can test your resourcefulness.

Drupal and Salesforce both provide ways to run large jobs across many processing contexts. New developers on both platforms often only resort to using batch and queueable operations as a last resort, but learning to use those solutions is critical to success on most interesting projects. When you try to avoid them you create solutions that appear to work and fail at scale.

Coming to Salesforce from Drupal, I already knew and understood the importance of asynchronous batch processing. So when solutions needed batch processing it was second nature to learn that part of the platform.

Extend the Platform’s Strengths

For all Salesforce’s push and marketing to avoid code, Salesforce developers are often taught that once you write code you just do everything in your code. The interfaces you can use to extend the platform’s existing solutions are treated as advanced topics. But when you work with Drupal, you are encouraged from the start to create modules that build on and extend the platform’s existing strength. Drupal developers are encouraged to leverage the features and utilities all around them.

This has always been true, but even more after Drupal’s move to leverage Symphony plugins and services. As a developer used to extending the platform, I came to Salesforce looking for ways to extend the platform’s declarative tools.

Often Salesforce developers create powerful solutions built purely in code triggered by record changes or simple buttons. They look passed Apex Actions that extend the Flow declarative automatons, platform events, and other tools that extend the system. But when you embrace a platform’s basic structures you often create more flexible solutions than your could with pure code.

The mind set of extending a platform, which I brought with me from my Drupal work helps me create tools and solutions that are designed to adapt over time.

Leverage Events

Event driven architectures are not new, but their popularity continues to grow. Where platforms used to follow informal patterns that equated to event systems, now we see formal event structures being build to replace old habits.

Drupal and Salesforce both have had event frameworks for a long time: Drupal had hooks (events by naming convention), Salesforce had triggers.

Both have seen major upgrades to their event patterns in recent versions. Platform events in Salesforce, still making their full power clear to a lot of developers. Symphony brought proper events to Drupal in version 8 and continue to help push the platform forward.

I have learned to leverage the events systems on both platforms. Understanding them as tightly constrained state machines, and learning to push them to their limits, helps me get the most from both platforms.

My experience with Drupal hooks and events has made it obvious to me when to leverage Salesforce’s Platform events. As Salesforce increases the number of places you can use them in their declarative tools, it increases the value of this approach.

So What?

As a developer, what you learn in one part of your career can make you stronger in the next. As a field we’re not actually that creative. Even if the details are different, the concepts will often carry forward because they are built on the same fundamentals. Whatever platform you are using today, learn how to make it sing – it’ll help you learn the next faster and better.

The post What I Brought from Drupal to Salesforce appeared first on Spinning Code.

We had hardly learned the Czech greeting “Dobrý den” when the time came to say goodbye. The long-awaited DrupalCon Prague, Europe’s biggest Drupal conference, rushed by like a shooting star leaving vivid memories. Let’s collect them one by one right now! The same happy author who wrote the expectations of a first-time attendee is here for you again with a recap of the most memorable moments of DrupalCon Prague 2022.

Let us quickly guide you through the essential basics of risk management to keep you prepared for choosing the best strategy for the fluctuating times.

Last week I visited the city of Prague to attend the European DrupalCon 2022. The even was held between September 20th and 23rd, and was attended by over 1,200 people.

This was my first physical conference since DrupalCamp London 2020, and the first DrupalCon I have attended since DrupalCon Dublin 2016. Despite the worries about covid I was still pretty exited to attend the event. I arrived on Monday night and as the event didn't start properly until Tuesday afternoon it gave me a small chance to explore the city of Prague before the conference started.

There were so many talks, sessions, meetings, and events during DrupalCon that I could write for pages and pages about the conference. I am quite sure, however, that no one would actually read all of that I'll just post a couple of highlights from each day and provide a sum up at the end.

Tuesday

After the initial welcoming talk the conference started with an introduction to some of the initiatives that are being worked on at the moment, each one introduced by a member of the initiative team. The initiatives discussed where CKEditor 5, project browser, project update bot, GitLab integration, localize.drupal.org, distributions and recipes, and automatic updates.

Read more.

If you look over this blog, or know me, you will see that I’ve now have reasonably significant experience as both a Salesforce and Drupal developer. The last couple weeks I have been thing about what from my Drupal experience supports my work as a Salesforce developer.

I think there are three parallels that are encouraged in Drupal developers that helped me learn to be a good Salesforce developer quickly.

1. Embrace, don’t fight, Platform Constraints
2. Extend the Platform’s Strengths
3. Leverage Events

Embrace Salesforce Platform Constraints

Both Drupal and Salesforce run in constrained environments. Web applications, regardless of their purpose, have to protect themselves against bad actors and bad neighbors. There are execution timeouts and memory limits, for both platforms. Salesforce adds a variety of additional limits and governors, but they are all logical extensions about memory and time. Lots of other platforms allow developers to ignore resource use until they reach a crisis point. Don’t believe me, just check the memory used by Chrome, Electron Apps, or any other Chromium-based application.

Working in resource constrained environments forces you to think through how to use the resources you do have efficiently. While these platforms aren’t like working on hardware with highly limited resources, they still can test your resourcefulness.

Drupal and Salesforce both provide ways to run large jobs across many processing contexts. New developers on both platforms often only resort to using batch and queueable operations as a last resort, but learning to use those solutions is critical to success on most interesting projects. When you try to avoid them you create solutions that appear to work and fail at scale.

Coming to Salesforce from Drupal, I already knew and understood the importance of asynchronous batch processing. So when solutions needed batch processing it was second nature to learn that part of the platform.

Extend the Platform’s Strengths

For all Salesforce’s push and marketing to avoid code, Salesforce developers are often taught that once you write code you just do everything in your code. The interfaces you can use to extend the platform’s existing solutions are treated as advanced topics. But when you work with Drupal, you are encouraged from the start to create modules that build on and extend the platform’s existing strength. Drupal developers are encouraged to leverage the features and utilities all around them.

This has always been true, but even more after Drupal’s move to leverage Symphony plugins and services. As a developer used to extending the platform, I came to Salesforce looking for ways to extend the platform’s declarative tools.

Often Salesforce developers create powerful solutions built purely in code triggered by record changes or simple buttons. They look passed Apex Actions that extend the Flow declarative automatons, platform events, and other tools that extend the system. But when you embrace a platform’s basic structures you often create more flexible solutions than your could with pure code.

The mind set of extending a platform, which I brought with me from my Drupal work helps me create tools and solutions that are designed to adapt over time.

Leverage Events

Event driven architectures are not new, but their popularity continues to grow. Where platforms used to follow informal patterns that equated to event systems, now we see formal event structures being build to replace old habits.

Drupal and Salesforce both have had event frameworks for a long time: Drupal had hooks (events by naming convention), Salesforce had triggers.

Both have seen major upgrades to their event patterns in recent versions. Platform events in Salesforce, still making their full power clear to a lot of developers. Symphony brought proper events to Drupal in version 8 and continue to help push the platform forward.

I have learned to leverage the events systems on both platforms. Understanding them as tightly constrained state machines, and learning to push them to their limits, helps me get the most from both platforms.

My experience with Drupal hooks and events has made it obvious to me when to leverage Salesforce’s Platform events. As Salesforce increases the number of places you can use them in their declarative tools, it increases the value of this approach.

So What?

As a developer, what you learn in one part of your career can make you stronger in the next. As a field we’re not actually that creative. Even if the details are different, the concepts will often carry forward because they are built on the same fundamentals. Whatever platform you are using today, learn how to make it sing – it’ll help you learn the next faster and better.

The post What I Brought from Drupal to Salesforce appeared first on Spinning Code.

We had hardly learned the Czech greeting “Dobrý den” when the time came to say goodbye. The long-awaited DrupalCon Prague, Europe’s biggest Drupal conference, rushed by like a shooting star leaving vivid memories. Let’s collect them one by one right now! The same happy author who wrote the expectations of a first-time attendee is here for you again with a recap of the most memorable moments of DrupalCon Prague 2022.