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 bases system that is built on Google Cloud Platform.  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.  The theme by itself contains over 50,000 lines of code.  

Support