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First demo of the new University web site

The project to develop a Drupal content management system for the University's web site reached a significant milestone last Thursday, when the project board were given a demo of the first web site to be migrated to the new platform. It looked good.  The display automatically adjusts to the size of the screen (responsive design) and the navigation has been redesigned to be simpler and to accommodate this adaptive behaviour. 

For editors, the system is much easier to use.  You can log in from any page of the website and start editing it then and there - if you have the right permissions.  The content editor is both more flexible and more straightforward.  The first users are describing the interface as a joy to use (and this is before the team have finished tidying it up).

Behind the scenes, this was a close-run demo.  The content was migrated only the day before and the editors were working frantically to tidy it up on the morning before the board meeting.  We would all have preferred to have reached that stage several weeks earlier.  Unfortunately we were delayed, in part by unexpected infrastructure problems.  So I have to thank the team for working flat out to get everything back on track.

We were helped by our automated content migration tools.  With these, we can export pages from the old CMS and load them into the new one such that only a small amount of tidying up is needed.  The process of preparing the demo shows that these tools worked smoothly, which bodes well for the large amount of content migration we face in the coming year.

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