Designing for Scale in a Large University Environment

Large universities present a unique challenge for digital design and CMS platforms, namely how to maintain brand and UX consistency and leverage content and technology investments across hundreds or even thousands of websites, all within a decentralized decision making organization. Our work at The University of Chicago illustrates one approach to these challenges based on a large library of design components built on the Drupal 10 CMS, along with a set of processes to rapidly deploy the platform to new departments and divisions. The platform has been deployed on multiple hosting environments, including Pantheon, Acquia, and self-hosted and new customizations for any one department can be shared across all departments.  This presentation will walk you through the fundamental problems we were trying to solve, the design of the core platform, and the processes used for maintaining, enhancing, and deploying the platform to various units across the University.