Author: Lois Nilsen
The Digital Commons website platform has been growing at a fast clip since the first site went live in June 2015, with several coming on board in the next few months. **
As with any technology that is five years old, it’s time for an upgrade!
About the Existing and New Platform
The Digital Commons platform sits on an open source web content management system called Drupal. With Digital Commons 2.0, we are moving to the latest enterprise-grade version of Drupal.
Our websites will become faster and more accessible to people with disabilities. Users will experience an easier and cleaner user interface. We will have the ability to more easily integrate with state and third-party applications, adding more value for both the platform and end-users.
Along the way, we will make some common-sense improvements to the functionality and design. The target completion date to move all websites is the end of 2021.
Agency Input
We have three forms of agency input:
- On this web form, anyone with knowledge of the platform can tell us their "desires," what they think we should consider during the upgrade. (September 2020 note: the web form was active for a year and has been retired.)
- An advisory group made up of eight website managers from agencies on the platform will help us understand agency needs as we move through this process.
- We are also consulting results from two surveys run recently, a survey of all users and another survey of website managers.
What's Next?
Our office, Digital Solutions of DIT, will work with each agency to migrate their website. We are assessing what kind of involvement will be needed from each agency. In the meantime, we encourage all those who manage websites to clean up their current sites of unneeded content and documents.
Look for updates in this space!