University of Denver

About this project

The challenge

A university is not one website. It is a central institutional site plus dozens of college and department sites, each with its own staff, its own priorities and its own publishing schedule, all of which still have to read as one institution to a prospective student. The two obvious approaches both fail. Let every unit run its own site and you get duplicated effort, inconsistent branding and a dozen different ideas of what a program page is. Force everything into a single site and no unit can move without waiting on somebody else. On top of that, two of the things every unit wants to show, upcoming events and the people who work there, do not live in the CMS at all: they belong to campus systems, and nobody wants unit staff manually updating them.

What we built

We helped build and deploy DU's campus-wide Drupal platform on Acquia Cloud Site Factory. That includes the core institutional site and a shared template every academic unit site is built from, so a new college site starts from the same foundation as the rest and does not drift away from them over time. Content is maintained on a central content site and synced to the primary DU website using Content Sync, a content distribution product built for enterprise Drupal estates, so material maintained once appears where it belongs instead of being copied between sites. Making that work the way DU needed was not a configuration exercise: it took substantial custom development inside Drupal around the product to fit their content and editorial model. Events import from external campus systems and people profiles come from Banner, so unit staff never re-enter them. Configuration management workflows keep the estate consistent as changes roll out across it. Alongside the build we worked with DU's internal teams on process, documentation and training, because a platform this size has to be run by the university rather than by whoever built it.

The result

Academic units publish on their own schedule from one platform while still starting from a shared foundation and reading as one university. Events and staff profiles stay current because they come from the systems that already hold them, Banner included. DU's own teams operate the platform, with the documentation and training to do it, and we have worked with them on it since 2019 rather than handing it over at launch.

Built with

• Drupal
• Acquia Cloud Site Factory
• Multisite platform architecture
• Shared template for academic unit sites
• Content Sync integration for cross-site content distribution
• External event imports
• Banner profile integration
• Configuration management workflows
• Documentation and training for internal teams