Web Express Technincal Presentation (ARB version)

What is Web Express?

Web Express is the custom-built website content management system (CMS) for the primary CU Boulder website.  The platform is designed to be easy to use, branded and accessible and is supported and managed by the campus. 

Web Express can be used by campus units, departments and groups to support content, marketing and communication goals and is provided as a campus service by Strategic Relations and Communications (SRC). 

Benefits for the University

Unified Brand Identity

Consistency in look and feel are crucial to maintain our brand identity for visitors of CU Boulder.

Each of the nearly 1,000 individual sites that makes up part of www.colorado.edu benefits from having a strong brand identity that allows visitors to immediately identify that site as part of CU Boulder.  

Accessibility and Compliance

Web Express provides a platform to create accessible and responsive content by default.  Helping content creators to make content which is compliant with our legal and ethical obligations to make our content available and accessible to as many people as possible. 

Security and Reliability

The Drupal platform is open source and well tested in production.  However with such a large code base which is extended by additional contrib modules as well as significant custom CU Boulder additions it is important to ensure that every site using Web Express is updated and tested regularly. 

Ease of Use

Web Express attempts to make it as easy as possible to add new content to the web without needing to have an understanding of the underlying web technologies allowing content creators to focus on making great content.  

Platform Technologies

Hosting

Web Express is hosted on the cloud service provider Pantheon.  Pantheon specializes in hosting large Drupal and Wordpress sites.  They use a container-based system that is built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  We take advantage of their partnership with Fastly to get worldwide CDN hosting of our content as well.  

We use this to host the nearly 1,000 sites that make up www.colorado.edu as well a handful of high-profile subdomain sites including alerts.colorado.edu, libraries.colorado.edu and oit.colorado.edu.  

Drupal

Web Express is built on top of Drupal.  Drupal is a robust, open-source content management framework known for its flexibility, security and large developer community.  

Currently we're using the latest version of Drupal 10, having successfully migrated the last of our Drupal 7 sites over to the new version in November of 2024.  

We expect to be moving to Drupal 11 before the end of the calendar year.  

Bespoke CU Boulder Solution

Drupal is a platform for creating a custom CMS solution.  The Web Express platform built on top of Drupal employs over 50 third-party contributed modules to add necessary functionality to the site.  Some of these are small enhancements only used by a small number of sites, others are critical subsystems like SMTP for sending email or SAML for authentication against the University provided FedAuth system.  

Additionally the local development team has created over 20 custom modules to extend core functionality and provide CU Boulder specific solutions.  We have also created a custom Drupal 10 theme to enforce brand standards, responsive layouts and facilitate accessibility for all of the content types currently supported by Web Express.  

Support

The Team

Development

2 Full Time Employees

The development staff are primarily responsible for developing, implementing and maintaining the theme and custom modules needed by the Web Express CMS.
Additionally they are the final layer of technical support for Web Express.  

Operations

1 Full Time Employee

Our Senior Site Reliability Engineer is responsible for deploying, operating, updating and keeping the portfolio of sites using Web Express at CU Boulder online.
The SRE is also on-call for support at all hours.  

UI/UX Design and Support

1 Full Time Employee

The UI/UX Design manager is the person tasked with initial design of new content types.  He is also the primary support professional who triages all of the incoming support requests and answers as many of them as possible.  

Sites
  • 1001 sites in production on the Pantheon hosting service (a handful of these are not Web Express) 

 

  • 5521 - Sites Managers
  • 6512 - Content Editors
  • 540 unique pages (nodes) on the homepage
  • 11500 unique pages (nodes) on the Today site
Code
  • 21 custom Drupal 10 modules created by CU Boulder developers
  • 50000 lines of code in the CU Boulder base Drupal 10 theme
  • 13 custom page (node) entities, 32 custom block entities, 23 custom paragraph entities 

 

  • Drupal 10.4.7 and PHP 8.3.21 (planning to go to Drupal 11 and PHP 8.4 before the end of the calendar year) 
  • 54 contrib Drupal 10 modules created by the open source community
Views

Top 3 sites in May 

 

Visits

Page Views

Homepage

6.57M

14.1M

Today

504K

1.3M

OIT*

179K

784K

Future Development

  • Content Syndication and Discovery
  • Regression Testing Framework
  • CRM roadmap implementation work

Future Operations

  • Oghma - knowledge, inventory and orchestration tool
  • Configuration validation tool (may end up being part of Oghma)
  • Drupal 11 migration work