Meet SiteFarm! University of California's Drupal 8 Collaboration

Shawn DeArmond / John Kealy / Quyen Vaillant
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Proctor

The University of California System is big. Like, really really big. 10 campuses, plus a couple auxiliary units employ 21,200 academic staff, 144,000 administrative staff and serve 251,000 students.

Because of the distributed nature of the UC System, each campus has their own Drupal 7 distribution. If they were lucky. Some campuses had more than one. Most campuses had a dozen other web solutions too. This was indeed the Wild West of Web platforms.

Some of us realized that with the release of Drupal 8, we have an opportunity to join forces and collaborate on building the best Drupal distribution for Higher Education.

So UCSF, UCLA, and UC Davis joined forces and, well, we did it. And it's called SiteFarm.

Because of this effort, we stand to realize significant security, stability, accessibility, and consistency gains across all campuses. Not to mention, reducing duplication of work. So much duplication of work...

In this session, we'll cover:

  • Identifying the problem
  • Building a grassroots collaboration
  • Establishing governance
  • Development
  • Automated testing
  • Evangelism
  • Success!
  • Future plans
Previous Knowledge

No previous knowledge required, but you might benefit from knowing what Drupal is.