My small part in making an American university website live

Just before Christmas, I was privileged to help Archetype 5 with the building of the Western State Colorado University on Drupal. With my usual timely manner of writing blogposts, I'm just writing this to point out that it's gone live! I have to say it looks fantastic: really bold and adventurous, which I hope was what the university intended.

The site's development and deployment procedures all showed a keen and thorough commitment to Drupal Features: pretty much all configuration was captured in a feature or other, somewhere. This paradigm was augmented by workflowing on the Pantheon platform, managed through their GUI. Pantheon as a platform is dedicated to developing, staging and deploying Drupal code, and felt especially suited to Features-powered deployment.

I came in towards the end of the project and helped to ramp up developer resource close to launch, to focus on and tackle the long tail of changes that projects often get in those last few weeks and days. The Features- and Pantheon-driven workflow meant I could very neatly slot in with other work and at a minimum not be a headache to anyone else! Still, despite my humble contributions, I'm really pleased to see it in the wild, and hopefully making a real difference to the university's online presence.