IT Services at the University of Oxford has spent the last two years building a centralised web publishing platform. This project started as a small proof of concept to prove demand, and grew into a fully-fledged multitenancy (not multi-site!) Drupal implementation hosted in the cloud with Acquia.
This project had to contend with several firsts, including: first project for a newly formed web team, first agile project for the team members, first software development to use automated deployment and testing, first home grown application to be hosted in the cloud, first project to be funded through incremental investment. At the same time, the project also encountered some familiar challenges, notably the governance framework for delivering a highly accessible SaaS platform in a 900 year-old University comprising many institutions and organisational layers.
The service has now been launched and we already have well over 50 sites built on our platform. We also have an ambitious roadmap with several significant architectural changes on the horizon to continue to evolve the platform.
Summary:
- Title: Oxford Mosaic – A Web Publishing Platform for the Future
- Type: Plenary
- Hashtag: #P7
- Speaker: Matthew Castle & Ruth Mason, University of Oxford
- Date and time: 11.30-12.00 on Wednesday 12 July 2017
- Venue: Keynes Lecture Theatre 1 (LT1)
Additional resources:
- Twitter archive: archive of tweets (hosted on wakelet.com)
- Video: IWMW 2017 – P7: Oxford Mosaic: A Web Publishing Platform for the Future (hosted on youtube.com)
- Sketch notes: IWMW17 Ruth Mason, Matthew Castle · mearso (hosted on mearso.co.uk)
- Slides are available on Slideshare
