Drupal FAQs

Find answers to common questions about migration or building a site in Emory Universal Site Builder.


Practical Considerations

Site owners are responsible for migrating their own sites or hiring an approved third-party vendor through Emory Express. When making your decision, you should consider the following: 

  • Determine whether you need a completely new site, a full redesign to replace an existing site, or a straight migration of an existing site with few structural or content changes. 
  • Do you have team members to build pages and edit content?  
  • How much time can you or someone on your team devote to page building and content editing? 

The cost to migrate can vary widely, so begin analyzing your situation as soon as you can. The following considerations should drive budget planning:  

  • Decide if you need an external vendor.  
  • Vendor quotes largely depend on page count, so removing outdated content saves money. Special features and functionality often add cost.  
  • Quotes will be based on your requirements. Do you need help with strategy, audit, writing, photography, etc.?  
  • You may need to budget across multiple fiscal years, depending on your start date.  
  • Don’t forget to plan and budget for ongoing maintenance after launch.  

With training, provisioning, and the design system, you may be able to migrate and build your site without additional help or cost. 

However, if you decide to hire an external vendor, they should be able to estimate migration costs for you. Cost estimates will consider more than page counts and may include content complexity and required custom functionality.  

To find available vendors: 

  1. Go to Emory Express. 
  2. Click on Emory Express under Procurement. 
  3. Scroll down to find the Drupal Specialist Purchasing Guide button under Administrative Products & Services (Specialty Services) 

Training modules will be available beginning August 2026 in Brainier. Topics will include Drupal basics such as getting started, building pages, and adding and removing components, as well as core Emory Universal Site Builder tasks (i.e., creating content, menus, creating and publishing news stories, and media management). Find training materials here. 

The programmable portions “baked into” Drupal are already in place. Site owners will be responsible for what makes content accessible—proper heading use and structure, concise link text, forgoing images with text on them, and writing alt text for images. Compliance is everyone's shared responsibility. 

Access to Cascade will continue, but in-house development support will no longer be available. Unsupported sites remaining in Cascade long-term may face security risks, so it’s a good idea to make the transition from Cascade to Drupal within the next three years, as Cascade CMS will eventually be sunset. 

Options include using Emory’s Archive-It subscription or storing sites in compressed, offline storage. 

Use Cases

Cascade intranet sites will transition concurrently with external pages. For now, only sites using Cascade CMS will be moving into the central Drupal CMS. 

PDFs may still have a place, but publishing content in HTML is recommended whenever possible to improve accessibility and usability. 

The strategy is still being developed. The goal is for each school to manage and prioritize its own stories through a dedicated landing page within the Emory News site. 

The Trumba events calendar is not changing. 

No. This capability is not part of the standard Drupal build and would require third-party development. 

No, Emory Healthcare uses its own content management system. 

Software Integrations

Yes. Qualtrics forms can be linked with either a URL or QR code. They also can be embedded as iFrames. Currently, we do not have further module plans for Qualtrics. Since Qualtrics is the Emory-preferred forms platform, you’ll find more support if you switch over to Drupal. 

Drupal can handle chat bots, but we do not have that currently in the feature set. It would need to be added as a future improvement. Ivy Bot (Swoop Bot) is not in the Drupal Module store currently.  

Communications and Marketing follows Emory’s Responsible AI Guidelines for all implementations of AI integrations. At this time, we do not have AI or GPTs in our feature set. 

More Information

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