How the University of Colorado Boulder Web Express team supports and maintains 1,000 websites with a small staff.

1. Say no to special
snowflakes and scale
Drupal as a service for higher education

2. Kevin Crafts
@kevincrafts
Manager, User Experience &
Interface Design
University of Colorado Boulder

6. We Made Lots of Sites

7. We Made Lots of Sites

8. We Made Lots of Sites

9. We Made Lots of Sites

12. We Made Lots of Sites

13. We Made Lots of Sites

14. One Codebase To Rule Them All

15. Web Express
github.com/CuBoulder/express
drupal.org/project/express

16. • Web Express is available to all colleges, schools,
departments, faculty, and student groups free of
charge
• Approaching 1,000 installed sites, all running on
the same Web Express distribution
• Deploy monthly updates with new features,
improvements, and bug fixes
• Monthly training sessions where each attendee
gets their own Web Express sandbox

17. Web Express
Student
Group
Faculty
Website
College/
School Site
Campus
Website
Non-academic
Website

21. Our Team
Senior Developer
& DevOps
Senior Developer Developer Developer
& Designer
Information
Architect
Information
Architect
Training
& Support
Support
& Production
Director

22. Decisions
Making things easier on us

23. How can we support &
maintain 1000+
websites?

25. Strict Permissions
• There’s a lot of things our users are NOT allowed to
do
• Our users are not Drupal experts
• Our users are not website designers / developers
• In many cases our users are not even
communication or marketing professionals

26. X

27. X

28. X

29. X

30. X

33. These were the right
decisions

35. Theme & Design

36. Branding Standards
are your best friends

38. One Theme To Rule Them All

39. Base Theme
Child Themes
Minimal CSS & HTML Changes

41. Starting Simple
Express Core & Add-on Bundles

43. Profile Module
Manager
https://www.drupal.org/project/profile_module_manager

47. Express Add Content
https://www.drupal.org/project/express_add_content

50. Express Help
https://www.drupal.org/project/express_help

54. Saying No

55. “People think focus means
saying yes to the thing you've
got to focus on. But that's not
what it means at all. It means
saying no to the hundred
other good ideas that there
are. You have to pick
carefully. Innovation is saying
no to 1,000 things.”
- Steve Jobs

56. What We Learned

59. Develop / Design for
the 90%

60. Make tools that you
want / like to use

61. Embrace branding
standards and visual
guidelines

62. Make your service free
(if possible)

63. Working on multiple custom
projects distracted us from being
able to create roadmaps for future
releases and enhancements

64. We needed a staff
member dedicated to
training and support

65. Removing ability to add modules,
themes, content types, css, etc
enabled us to diagnose problems
quickly

66. Simple core functionality
made training and
support easier

67. Inline help links reduced
the number of support
tickets we receive

68. Automated testing helps us
prevent most bugs from being
deployed to productions websites

69. What about Drupal 8?

72. Web Express
github.com/CuBoulder/express
drupal.org/project/express

73. We’re Hiring!
colorado.edu/webcentral/jobs

74. Questions?

75. Kevin Crafts
@kevincrafts
Manager, User Experience &
Interface Design
University of Colorado Boulder