One year on from launching the new home.cern website, the CERN online landscape has begun to change. Now, more than 600 websites are in production or development using the main open-source content management system supported at CERN: Drupal 8 (D8). Some of these websites have been highlighted in a new Drupal showcase website to give examples what is possible with the new CERN D8 theme.
Last year, when D8 was launched at CERN, it was accompanied by a webtools website to help guide new users. The webtools took on board user feedback and requirements from the last six years of using Drupal 7 at CERN, and continue to be regularly enhanced and improved. Alongside Drupal 8 CERN training courses, these webtools help those embarking on new websites, or migrating their existing websites to Drupal 8. In addition, a new easy-start template is now available to help those unfamiliar with the technology to enter content into a pre-existing template. When creating a new CERN website, there is now the choice of the easy-start, demo or blank Drupal 8 templates.
By mid-2020, Drupal 7 will no longer be supported at CERN, so website owners will either need to move their websites to Drupal 8, or explore alternatives. To help them with this task, each Drupal 7 website owner was contacted earlier this year with proposals of either moving to Drupal 8 or to alternative technologies.
For those remaining on Drupal, the Drupal community, supported by the IR web team and IT Drupal infrastructure team, uses an online forum and face-to-face meetings every two weeks to help answer queries, alongside twice-yearly official meetings.
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