The other day a friend of mine, who works at a university, told me he was on a committee to choose a CMS for the whole university. I definitely don’t envy that task, but I do find it quite interesting.
A lot of us have probably seen companies/institutions make what seems to be embarrassingly bad tech choices. For instance, paying unbelievable monthly fees for simple things like email and calendars when they could be using better and comparatively free Google services (we yell, while nobody listens).
That’s one of the places my mind immediately went when this comes up. Oh wow! What a great opportunity to save this large institution from wasting millions on some weird sleezy software contract and get them on something just as powerful and potentially free.
The other place my mind went is right to some tech that I would go with, if I was in charge. It would be so interesting to do this with WordPress Multisite! Just one set of software to keep updated. Yet, different departments could have their own sites with their own administrative control. Assets could be shared as needed, but each site could be as unique as needed as well. Fun!
I even asked on Twitter for other suggestions as well:
From a friend: “I’m on the committee to pick a CMS for our entire university. Opinions?”
I’ll relay yours!
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 12, 2015
Answers I got included every single CMS you’ve ever heard of, as well as MARKETING BOTS out to convince me their way is the right way. Lisa summed up a common feeling:
@chriscoyier Drupal is my serious answer, "lololololololololololol" is my also-serious answer
— lisa maria (@redsesame) January 12, 2015
Turns out: cart before horse.
It’s thinking like I was doing that gets companies into messy situations to begin with. Some TECH DUDE who’s got it all figured out before the considerations are even made very clear.
There is a lot more to consider than just tech.
Who’s going to implement and work on this CMS?
You know how many IT employees they had to work on this and maintain it? Zero.
Yep, zero. They don’t really have a true IT department (or whatever you want to call it) to manage the university’s website(s).
They also aren’t really looking to change that fact. They aren’t trying to build a new department for that. They aren’t trying to contract or hire freelancers to do it. They are trying to just buy a hosted CMS system. Probably from a company that specializes in that kind of thing. A company they can work with the set it up. A company they can call for help, or more likely, have an ongoing contract with to support.
Part of that reasoning is…
Capex vs Opex
That is, “Capital expenditure” vs Operating expenditure”. This looks to be a decent article on that. It’s a big difference for businesses like a university. One is deductible, one isn’t.
@chriscoyier One big issue is HOW they pay—license fees are capital expenses, developer costs are not.
— Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) January 12, 2015
I’m sure there are other big important considerations here as well that are above my head.
But suddenly, spending a million bucks on a CMS contract doesn’t seem so out of the question. Imagine trying to hire a whole team of local developers to take this project on. It would be hard, slow, and cost just as much if not more. And there is no guarantee it’ll be better, in fact it feels more like a gamble.
As Karen says:
@chriscoyier Some orgs have an easier time paying a $500k license fee than paying for Drupal/WP devs
— Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) January 12, 2015
It’s not the CMS
Any CMS can do CMSy things.
Obviously it needs to have custom data structures, custom templates, custom URL design. You should be able to build the kind of site you want with it. Some CMSs are more opinionated than others in this regard, but any one worth its salt is a tool toward building the site you need.
It’s the CMS
And yet… it’s certainly still worth your time to consider what CMS’s offer and how they handle certain things.
- Can the CMS manage multiple sites?
- What is your mobile plan? Can the CMS deal with that?
- What is the upgrade process like?
- What is the documentation like?
- Is community around the CMS important?
- Is there paid support available?
- Can it handle permission levels that match the university’s structure?
- Should you want or need to hire out to help with it, is that possible? Easy?
- What features can you imagine your CMS needing? Now vs in a few years time? (e.g. “Let’s add a forum! Let’s give students profiles! We need a chat room!”)
- Have you thought about security? Backups?
Who’s going to be actually using this CMS?
This is perhaps the most important consideration.
Not who’s going to be using the website. That’s students and prospective students and yes that’s all important stuff but not what we’re dealing with right now.
Who is going to be adding content, managing content, basically the primary user of the CMS? Can you give them a CMS that is perfect for their needs? That is easy for them to use? That allows them to wrangle that content in the most useful and effective possible way?
Karen, again:
@chriscoyier Less important which one they pick, way more important that they plan for time required to define and customize author UX.
— Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) January 12, 2015
The right CMS is a customized one — right? Can you build input screens that are perfectly custom to what these people need? Can you make sure they don’t resort to copying and pasting from Word? From linking up PDFs?
Insanity, confusion
I am not at all envious of my friend because of this. I just can’t imagine a world in which a committee like this, conversations and meetings like the ones he’s having aren’t filled with insanity, confusion, and bullsh*t.
Probably some lightly bad stuff like people that are involved that probably shouldn’t be. People that just aren’t grasping what’s going on. Important people not contributing.
And then probably some awful stuff like people posturing for control. Red tape. Power struggles.
I don’t really have any advice for all that, except to say that it can’t be ignored. The human part of all this is just as big a part than the intellectual tech discovery stuff.
More Resources
- Kerry-Anne Gilowey’s deck “Getting Your Specs in a Row: Your role in CMS selection”
Examples of What Some Universities Use
- Notre Dame case study (Plone)
- University of Georgia case study (Statamic)
- Dickinson College case study / Butler Community College case study (Jadu)
- BigTree CMS has several universities listed in its “sites using” section: Kenyon College, DePauw University, and University of Puget Sound
- Drupal powers a ton of universities I’m sure, but specifically at least Western Washington, University of Oregon, SCAD, and University of Colorado
- I’m sure the same is true of WordPress, with examples like Edge Hill University and Boise State University.
- Liferay has similar with examples like Universite de Etea and York University
- Pantheon runs Arizona State, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts
- TERMINALFOUR seems to be entirely focused on higher ed
- Moore College of Art and Design and Franklin and Marshall College run on Apostrophe
- The City University of New York runs Commons in a Box
- University of Richmond uses Hannon Hill
I’m probably not going to maintain this list over time, but if you feel like chiming in about what universities are using what (and even better, how that’s working for them) in the comments, please do!
Our company does a lot of work in higher ed. And we’ve found that even though a good chunk of universities/colleges use WordPress, it seems a large part of the bigger ones prefer Drupal in general.
As your list shows: there’s lots of variation, but especially our bigger clients seem to go for Drupal.
I am using OctoberCMS for a while and I thing it’s the best one yet. Even though I’m a front-end developer, I developed complicated plugins and themes with it easily!
I’ve been out of school for a very long time so I’m not being facetious here.
Do these universities offer classes in web design and development? Do any of them have a required lab where students have to maintain an actual web presence? Might be interesting…
Yes there are classes that teach development at most schools. There are also rules (laws?) against forcing volunteer work like that. In any case, at the school where I teach, students who do work for the university must be given a job title and be paid money. Unpaid work that the university benefits from in exchange for grades/credit is a no-no.
We have been using Wagtail CMS for several projects, and it give us the flexibility required. It was initially built for Royal College of Art.
We work with a lot of Universities. Drupal is our core development platform although we have worked with WordPress as well. One thing that we still find frustrating is that most Universities do not set any type of restriction, in fact we have found that each department is free to choose whatever platform that they choose. This can result in a ridiculous number of technologies in play. Another gotcha is hosting. Universities, have some very private data and security can be a real focus. For instance, Canadian Universities have to be hosted in Canada.
Lots of consideration for sure.
Whatever is picked, there will be backlash over the/any/a change, employees will lose sleep over it, and there’ll be groups who will feel like none of their needs were met. Usually there’s not enough money to make it gel anyway, so it’s almost just a matter of picking your battles.
However, if you’re going to be completely tech-dependent on a third-party, it seems like it’s just a matter of shopping all of the proprietary CMSs and picking one you like. Then grab a helmet and hire someone to train your University on how to use it and then have that be the only thing that person does.
Great article! I remember you bringing this up on ShopTalk with Lea and Emily. The best CMS is definitely a customized one.
And the most important thing to remember is that people solve problems, not technology. The tech is just the vehicle to do the work.
I can see how a hosted cloud based solution could be a great fit for some but terrible for others. A university may even pick multiple smaller systems, say for each department based on their individual needs. There’s advantages to standardizing on one piece of code but there’s benefits to not having all your eggs in one basket (so to speak) too.
A website is really a living and breathing organism so having good people to support a web project after it’s done is key. I’ve noticed, a lot of times the original developers are eager to move on to the next thing but sometimes the best projects are the ongoing ones.
This is a good point here. A website is never “done”. If you want to license a ready-made CMS solution, you’re still going to need developers on your staff or money to pay for a support subscription.
I’m the web developer for Illinois Wesleyan University. We use OU Campus from OmniUpdate. Our administrators in IT and Communications and our content contributors from across the university (from people in the CS department to computer-averse secretaries) almost universally love it. It’s specific to higher ed, so they’ve worked out most of the problems you laid out. The vast majority of their clients (myself included) use their SaaS hosting. Your friend should definitely add it to the list if it isn’t there already!
Another thing to consider is how will search handle multiple sites built with a single CMS. When a user performs a search, what should the scope of that search be? When spinning up sites in Drupal, each with its own database, or sites in WPMS, each with their own collection of tables, the search results will generally be limited to the site the user is currently visiting and not the institutional site as a whole. Depending on how you position these sites this may not be what you desire.
You would probably want to consider using a proper search engine rather than database based solutions for medium to large sites. Something like Apache Solr or elasticsearch. You can easily set up multiple disconnected Drupal sites to push their content into a single index for fine grained or global search.
Joomla anyone?
I use joomla all day… I never got the fascination with WordPress. I’ve worked on both and especially if you’re a themed, WordPress can be a little too much in trying to achieve something seemingly simple. People used to crap on Joomla for its complexity but through years of working with it, it has really hit its stride and I have a long list of clients that I have converted from WordPress because it is an industry buzzword and people are more inclined to believe that it is more user friendly… I have taught the most non-computer savy people to use joomla websites like a boss… Just my two cents but I think now it’s more of a preference thing like mobile operating systems… You’re okay either way you go because even themers now have identical themes for these two platforma
I’ve setup Joomla for clients over the years (nothing as big as a university). They are able to maintain & update the site, and add features in the future. Like other popular CMS options, there is a lot of online information/help.
Just the other day, a client asked if they could also use Joomla to run their employee intranet. My email reply was quick, and explained Joomla has access levels. They were able to setup a company intranet through Joomla admin screens.
The University of Washington uses many CMSs (Drupal among them), however many of the top-level units are hosted on WordPress MultiSite by the University Marketing & Communications Web team (I’m a team member).
We host over 70 UW sites, including the homepage.
Pantheon is just a hosting platform, it runs either drupal or wordpress.
Arizona State and California College of the Arts are both running on Drupal, as for Berkeley I wasn’t able to quickly verify.
Drupal is probably the best choice. Open source, no licensing fees, easy to use. Good for small sites and better for enterprise level. Scaling is important with University sites. CU is on Drupal and I maintain many college sites with it as well.
API is pretty clean and Drupal 8 goes even further by integrating Symphony API and using TWIG as a template engine.
Brandon University (Canada) uses WordPress Multisite. The person in charge gave a talk about it to our local WP meetup, and it looks like it works well for them.
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI; uses dotCMS.
My biggest pieces of advice would be to make sure whatever system you use has a very robust RTE and you bring the authors into the conversation before choosing a platform.
I work for a fairly large organisation and we’re wedded to an “enterprise” .net cms with a particularly bad RTE. A functional RTE is absolutely crucial to the success of any cms. Authors need to be able to comfortably make edits without worrying about “breaking the HTML”. In a large organisation you can almost guarantee the authoring in the cms will be distributed, which essentially means people who don’t know HTML that well will be pasting from word. Masks sure the cvms can deal with this.
Also make sure the cms’s content models work for your organisation, for example will the IA be a tree or taxonomy driven? A tree might work really well for one organisation but be hopeless for another. Often tree or taxonomy is determined by the underlying structure of the cms.
Big organisations ate complex but the cms doesn’t need to be :)
I totally agree with you: very interesting, but I don’t envy him for that job at all. These meetings are a nightmare. Packed in a room with a bunch of “important” people that have seen this and that and “know” how things have to be done, but asking you when they have a computer issue. Daily madness in big institutions. :-)
I maintain the site at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We’ve been on SiteExecutive for almost 10 years. We’re actually about to begin the process of a CMS audit (with the help of a consultant) to see if that’s still the best solution for us. This is a very timely article for me.
Webmaster from Virginia Commonwealth University checking in. We use TerminalFour for the majority of our public websites. We like the flexibility in templating and its permissions and roles match well with our organization. We use their hosted solution so that means one less system for our system admins to worry about.
We were using another CMS for a long time and then briefly used WordPress multisite. The WordPress multisite got out of hand really quickly and became a nightmare to maintain.
Yes! YES! Thanks so much for sharing this, Chris. I have been working with Universities in Toronto for years now, and this is always the point of contention, or rather, hardest pitch to give the client. So often (well, almost always) the so called “IT” department at the university has already made up the departments mind (although in a very haphazard and uneducated manner) to the point where I have to walk them through the reasons why they should consider using another tool that better suits the departments needs. Yes, many if not all CMS tools do—as you say—CMSy things, but often times the “other” solution will better suit the department even if simplifying the execution (and removing unnecessary bloat from well known CMS tools on the market).
In my case, we often go with WordPress multisite as the solution (for reasons I will not bore you with) and in the end—BOOM, it’s the one that works, and most importantly the client is super happy. It’s about education, knowing what the client will benefit from, understanding that there will be many “cooks in the kitchen”, and overall cost-effective.
If I can share one of my most successful executions, it would be the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (http://munkschool.utoronto.ca). Four years in, and tonnes of content types later, they are still super happy with the decision we made for them!
Again, thanks Chris for sharing this!
Brian M
..can´t believe that on this page the word “TYPO3” didn´t appear once..
I have worked for a couple of years with TYPO3 (at my current job). And I wouldn’t recommend it even to my worst enemy. It’s a nightmare, and believe me, I’ve worked also with Joomla, Drupal, Worpress.
On the other hand, my favourite CMS is Drupal. I highly recommend it.
We use http://percussion.com for http://sfcollege.edu/ccs/
I was on such a committee for a large holding company that wanted a common platform for all the children organizations some of which are in the fortune 500. I was by far the most junior person on this team. What I learned, when you get to this level, risk mitigation becomes a major issue. Costs are not as important as perceived stability and feature completeness. In this case they wanted a totally hosted platform so that we would not have to maintain the infrastructure. It was a very eye-opening experience and though there were a few ill informed actors I was surprised by how pragmatic and knowledgeable most of the people involved in the decision making were.
We used an outside consultant to facilitate this process and I agree that it was money well spent. The consultant created a framework by which to compare very different products and solutions on an equal basis which is a lot harder than it sounds. How do you compare the total cost of ownership between an open source solution like Drupal versus a monolithic CMS like Interwoven?
In the end we ended up with a fully hosted version of Adobe AEM on the Amazon Cloud. So far (~2 years later) all the businesses are happy with the decision.
And who handles the tech support and development in your case, is it Adobe Consulting Services or a 3rd party vendor?
Slightly off topic, but I was recently contacted by a firearms dealer who wants a site where they can sell online. Whenever I talked to another developer, they had the same reaction of not envying me. Anyone have any input or thoughts on a way to approach a project like that?
I had a tiny Drupal site that I put up as a learning experience a few years back. If I understand correctly, the version I put up was discovered to have a security liability, but when I looked for advice on how to go forward, what I saw was “no way to tell if you’ve been breached, rebuild the site from scratch with a newer version of Drupal”. I took the site down, and wondered how developers with business clients who had sites with the same version of Drupal were coping. What did I miss!?
I’m surprised OmniUpdate OU Campus isn’t on your list. 700+ schools and counting…
+1. I’m a very happy customer. And they just won two Stevie Awards for customer service!
I work for a company that uses Umbraco quite a bit & wonder if anyone here has an opinion on its use for universities? From my (content management) p.o.v. with a hobby-level interest in front end (so, in other words, complete novice) — it looks like a great CMS.
Thoughts?
This article is really timely for me; my university is in the process of moving away from Ektron (now Episerver).
This is a very wonderful and wise “nutshell” of the issues, problems and players when a university is considering or re-considering a CMS. Thanks so much for your list of CMS evaluation questions, and your list of what universities are using.
As Benjamin said, TYPO3 is definitely worth to get mentioned. It’s perfectly suited for the needs of universities. I know the following universities are using TYPO3:
University of Athens
University of London
National University of Colombia
In Austria:
University of Vienna
Technical University Vienna
In The Netherlands:
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
Delft University of Technology
In Germany (where TYPO3 is very popular; Germans love quality):
University of Cologne
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
University Flensburg
University Erfurt
Bauhaus-University Weimar
University Trier
University Leipzig
University Hohenheim
University Kassel
University Passau
University Rostock
University Paderborn
Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg
Technical University Berlin
University Darmstadt
Beuth University for Technology
University for Technology, Economy and Culture Leipzig
University for Applied Sciences Hamburg
University Bochum
University Niederrhein
University Neubrandenburg
University Wismar
University Aachen
University Potsdam
University Flensburg
University Osnabrück
Drupal is used by some heavy hitters:
Oxford
Harvard built this tremendous service and open sourced it
Stanford have a similar tool for allowing staff to manage their own Drupal sites
… as do MIT
I appreciate not every institution has the digital staff needed to create such sophisticated services however.
Take a look at this one … http://www.couchcms.com maybe the best option .
I went through the same eval process. Looked at Joomla, Drupal etc etc. Settled on ModX. Solid, scalable, flexible product, huge community, well documented, paid support and cloud platform if you want it. Plenty of developers out there.
MODX is great for universities and is used by many.
http://modx.com
I notice nobody seems to have concerned themselves with the accessibility issue. Universities in particular may find themselves in difficulties with sight-impaired employees who cannot use their CMS management UI. The Ohio State University ran into this with their MODX CMS, and have partially funded an initiative to build a Manager UI interface that is fully a11y compliant. Actually I’m already using the a11y theme that has been developed so far, and it’s made quite a difference for my failing eyesight. http://a11y.modx.com/
Very interesting article as I am searching along the same lines. Thanks for sharing.
This is an interesting thread and an important topic. The situation can be different depending on how the web is governed at each institution, what IT resources are available, and how grumpy content editors are about the current state of affairs. What I’ve found is that it helps to follow a process that listens to stakeholders but is guided by practical considerations and experience (having a neutral third party involved really can help). mStoner helps institutions with CMS selection regularly, but we don’t sell a CMS. I wrote about our process here: http://www.mstoner.com/blog/technology-and-software/select-best-cms-college-university/
Good luck to all on the path to a new CMS!
We (the medical school/hospital system of UW Madison) use Terminal Four SiteManager. It’s UI is pretty bad and a number of simple workflows are overly involved, but it’s actually kind of a cool system.
For those that care: It’s essentially a static file generator with a front end made up of forms and fields (text, wysisyg editor, etc.). Where it gets interesting is that the generated files are totally agnostic. It could be php, jsp, html, whatever. And since it has an internal database and can be connected to them, the files you produce can be as dynamic as necessary.
We mostly use it to generate json, which gets pushed through some handlebars templates, ultimately returning as straight html.
Ultimately, it’s kind of like Jekyll on steroids.
This is essentially how OmniUpdate works as well.
http://omniupdate.com/products/oucampus/benefits/developers.html
“Database are great for storing large volumes of small blocks of data; however, there is typically a performance overhead when using a database to store large blocks of data. That is why OU Campus uses its database only where appropriate to store information that it needs to know about your content (e.g., permissions, tags, and other settings). Developers have the choice of using a MySQL, Microsoft SQL, SAP Sybase ASE, or PostgreSQL database. And it ruse on a separate staging server, so content is published to the live web server on demand. This architecture ensures your website is never throttled by the web CMS application or process. Both static and dynamic pages can be published this way.”
In my university (Bari, Italy – http://www.uniba.it) we use with success Plone (www.plone.org).
It’s a enterprise CMS written in Python. I has a lot of feature, customizable workflow and granular permission.
We’ve 26 “micro site” on the main platform, we can customize features, contentypes and specific aspect.
In Italy also Bologna Alma Mater (www.unibo.it) use Plone.
After Plone, for me, it’s impossible use another CMS :)
My 2cent
Vito
As a front end developer for a university I will say pick something that makes it easy for non technical people to enter content.
If your grandma could use the CMS good.
Any CMS’s design and front end can be customized with the right developer, but if the CMS is hard for the content editors to use there will be major headaches.
I am a web designer for the University of North Dakota and we’ve been using OmniUpdate’s OU Campus for about 5 years. Even though our site is in need of a redesign the backend is quite robust and won’t need to change. We have over 600 people across campus creating and managing content. Most of them work well in OU as it is easy for non-technical users. Many of our content creators are administrative assistants, students, and faculty. There is a spattering of developers and designers in the system – maybe 10 but they only work on their own section – it isn’t like a team. They only contribute to the global elements of the site by requesting new features which the web team builds. There are about four of us on the web team. A content manager, content support, developer, and designer (me).
We have an enterprise installation instead of OU Campus as SaaS. We run some auxiliary sites in a WordPress Network site and I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to accomplish what we do with our main site in WordPress. One really nice thing about OU (and I’m sure many other non-WP CMS) is single sign on. Our users can use the same credentials for (almost) all of their university services.
OU can be as open or closed as you want. We aim to make ours as easy to use for non-developers as possible. This means we are fairly restrictive in what we allow our content creators to do. (To the chagrin of content creators who are also developers – they feel too restricted and hate that they can’t write their own custom stuff as easily.)
I would say OU is a pretty good solution depending on who would be creating and managing the site’s content. Its worth putting on the list at least!
Kelicia,
I’m the web developer at Illinois Wesleyan University, and I’m a happy OU Campus customer, too. I just wanted to follow up about your comment re: SSO in WordPress. If you use CAS for SSO, I’d recommend wpCAS-w-LDAP.
We also got around some quirks with people who have NetIDs that don’t work as WordPress usernames (e.g. three-letter usernames) by using the Network Username Restrictions Override plugin.
Hope that helps! Shoot me an email if you want any more info about how we got WordPress CAS-ified!
Michael
Thanks Michael! I’ll check out those plugins!
While at Ball State University in Indiana, I got a student job that was part secretary/”CMS editor” for a campus department. I had to attend at least 2 hours of brand training aka don’t use all caps, colored text etc. They were very against departments looking different from the others and becoming too unique.
They were transitioning from Vignette to Sitecore CMS.
Here’s the info: http://cms.bsu.edu/web/cms
I was on the committee to choose a CMS for NYU’s relaunch so I know exactly what your friend is going through! It was a long process and we ended up choosing CQ5. Drupal was a big contender but in the end, people felt more comfortable having official support for the CMS. One big consideration was how easy it’d be to port from one CMS to another if we decided to change it in the future. So we went with a CMS that had loose coupling between templates and the proprietary templating language.
This is a Finance problem, not technology. Just get a vendor (in this case a Drupal shop), to quote you on build-out and maintainence options. You can re-up (purchase anew) your contractors for new projects, or critical maintainence. Thus you now have CapEx.
A Local university & college (in the UK college is lower-level) I used to lecture at, uses Drupal. Strangely enough, I only found out last year, my Mom’s second cousin was on / heads up the team that delivered it.
IMHO, not a good direction they have gone in, likely design + scoping by board of non-IT, non-marketing professionals, who wanted as many features as possible, none of which go together or add value, but it’s quite a large data-set and I imagine a lot of moving over / integration was required…
http://www.southessex.ac.uk/