Moving to Drupal

We assembled a big representative committee with representatives of students, faculty and staff, looked at several systems, from proprietary to open-source, from commercial to free, and discussed the possibilities on Wiki as well as with vendors that were invited to present their systems.  Finally, we chose Drupal, a popular open-source CMS. At the time, Drupal had over 2 million installs, and a huge and vibrant developer community. About the same time, soon after the election of president Obama, the White House website went Drupal (not that it influenced our decision, but it certainly raised the profile of Drupal.) So we converted to Drupal, thoroughly, sometimes painfully (deleting almost 8K obsolete pages and manually renaming almost 7K of the rest.). We also used the opportunity to change our look-and-feel a little bit. Mark Root-Whiley, an extremely talented student, proposed a new look for the college’s website. We hired Mark and asked him to adapt his look to our site (and much more – he was at the heart of the Drupal conversion).