Emory Drupal Rollout

Sites can take varying amounts of time to migrate. It depends on your site’s size, whether you’ll need support, your content strategy, and other factors. Following are typical steps you’ll need to take to migrate or create a basic site of 50 or fewer pages.

• Discovery: Retrieve your site map and visual assets or plan your site’s information architecture (IA) 
• Kickoff: Define your design and/or development needs 
• Content: Gather/write/edit content before migration and freeze existing site content 
• Training: Attend a Zoom session on Drupal basics (1–2 hours)
• Design: Create internal mockups, make revisions, and seek approvals (20–30 business days)
• Development: Build and migrate pages (35–50 business days)
• Quality Assurance (QA): Set aside time for proofing, functionality, and accessibility testing (10–20 business days)
• Launch: Final signoff and go live (1–2 business days)

Coordinate your plan

• Decide which sites you wish to migrate and in what order.
• Determine who in your department or unit will have primary responsibility for the migration project.
• Communicate plans with your leadership.

Audit your existing site

Decide what content you plan to keep, update, or delete. Complete instructions on how to conduct a content audit can be found on the Web Content Audits documentation page.

Clean up your website’s content

• Use web analytics to identify content that receives little or no traffic and consider eliminating it.
• Delete outdated or duplicative materials, especially PDFs.
• Update content on all pages as needed.
• Determine whether you are responsible for any sites that are no longer needed and can be sunset.
• Create a plan for archiving deleted content.
• Plan redirects by building a spreadsheet of removed pages with clear instructions on where the old URLs should redirect.

It’s important to decide upfront whether you can create or migrate internally or you need outside help. 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?

As you begin the planning for your website, please know that C&M and OIT will provide training materials and consultation throughout the process.

The earlier you start, the better prepared you will be. 

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. 

Some time in August 2026.

Migration is not mandatory immediately. However, the long-term goal is to sunset Cascade CMS within a few years.

Approximately 600 websites will need to migrated. Because of this volume, migrations will be staggered, and departments can choose when to migrate.

No. Site owners are responsible for migrating their own sites or hiring an approved third-party vendor through Emory Express. C&M and OIT will act as consultants and provide guidance.

The programmable portions that can be “baked in” to Drupal are already in place. Site owners will be responsible for what makes content accessible: proper heading use and structure, concise link text, and not using images with text on them. Compliance will be everyone's shared responsibility.

Deans and Senior Academic Communicators have been informed and will continue messaging at the school level. Broader communications will continue as the project progresses.

Yes.

We are focusing on teams using Cascade CMS who will be moving into the central Drupal CMS.

Planning is underway to understand impacts for WHSC schools. Cascade will remain available, and no immediate changes are required. More information will follow.

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

Yes. Cost estimates will consider more than page counts and may include content complexity and required custom functionality.

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

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.

Content Editor training will be offered starting close to August 2026.

Departments are responsible for their own site audits.

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

No, Healthcare will be on a separate CMS. This initiative is for the University.

We don't have a hard end date. Please plan to migrate to Drupal over the next three years.

Drupal allows subdirectories (such as provost.emory.edu/faculty/ or global.emory.edu/services/) so merging sites can be done. Ultimately, this strategy may help you with hosting costs as well, so we strongly urge you to consider it.

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.

Qualtrics forms can be linked with either a URL or QR code. They can also be embedded as iFrames. At this time, 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.

Like chatbots, we do not have this in the current feature set. An agent could certainly be linked externally. Defining what you need will help the Digital Strategy team tremendously.