Sector(s)
Team Members
Ranking 9th in the QS World University ratings and named the Times University of the Year 2024, University College London (UCL) is a powerhouse in leading higher education. With a Drupal 7 platform that was operating over 500 microsites, a modernised solution that would promote ease of publishing for editors and an enhanced user experience was required to ensure their digital estate would align to their global presence.
The University College London (UCL) had a Drupal 7 multisite platform running over 500 microsites across the estate. This had become difficult to manage, with a lack of cohesion between platforms causing an inefficient user experience as well as a headache for the content management team.
The priority for UCL was not only the upgrade to Drupal 10, but also providing greater flexibility to their internal development and content teams to have maximum control over the multisite platform. In order to keep cost and time investment as low as possible, ensuring UCL would have the capability to manage the bulk of the move internally was of paramount importance.
The first gamechanger for UCL was the development of a custom dashboard that operated as a command centre for managing hundreds of microsites. This dashboard automatically syncs when changes are made to the microsite estate, ensuring that the UCL team would have full ownership and view of the content on the platform.
In order to provide maximum control to the UCL team, Zoocha have enabled their in-house developers to quickly spin-up new microsites that can promote unique branding to each faculty or department that they represent. This process is fully configurable, allowing UCL to ensure content populated on each new page using a series of automated and manual content population techniques. This ability has been built to be achievable without requiring a devops or sysadmin intervention in order to launch.
This has been supported by the release of a global design system. Each page includes best practices on content management, with a global template that allows users to clone an example page rather than create a new concept from scratch. In order to ensure this continuously evolves, Zoocha have also provided UCL with the ability to update the template to reflect the most recent example of best practice, ensuring that content editors remain consistent and appropriately reflecting the UCL brand.
In our commitment to support the UCL team beyond launch, our team have also made the Drupal editor experience as intuitive as possible. This includes helper text, flexible templates and logical field structure, aiming to offer as much autonomy as possible.
On a pre-existing Drupal 7 estate, the UCL team wanted to benefit from the familiarity of Drupal whilst leveraging the masses of improvements brought by a D10 solution. Furthermore, the multisite capabilities brought by Drupal would allow UCL to manage a vast quantity of content in a centralised, secure and performant CMS.
Drupal is used by 80% of the top higher education institutions for a strong reason, the ability to control content across multiple departments and faculties whilst advancing the user experience through modern design has been essential to UCL.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Entity Share
Content sync between microsites, fully configurable to the content that UCL want to share, configured to the automated or manual. Users can create templates and then sync them across the various multisities.
Content Locking
Ensuring that elements of global functionality would remain consistent across microsites in a locked state.
OpenID Connect
Facilitating SSO across hundreds of users.
Scheduler
Scheduling content to move from one workflow state to another, for example from draft to published, published to archived etc.
Facets + Search API
We created a custom Funnelback integration into these modules to provide the various listing pages / components used throughout the ecosystem.
Paragraphs
Extensively used - provides the building blocks for the content
Migrate Plus + Migrate Tools
With a complex migration to complete, these tools helped streamline our development process.
