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Stanford Stanford WebCamp 2023 All Things Web - By community, for community
 

Static for Sustainability: Two Case Studies of Leaving Drupal Behind

Track
Content Strategy
Research / Academia
Site Building
Audience
Intermediate

What happens when your web-based digital research project is done? If you built it using Drupal, you can't just walk away -- someone has to keep maintaining the site indefinitely. This has been a dilemma for digital humanities projects for decades, and the ending is often a sad one: the site goes unpatched, gets hacked, must be taken down, and there are no resources to stand it back up. This talk covers two very different Drupal-based projects: one, a catalogue raisonné of Jan Brueghel, and another, a sourcebook of translated medieval texts. Both projects reached their point of completion with valuable resources that they wanted to have available in the long-term, but didn't want to bear the ongoing maintenance costs. Both chose to migrate to Jekyll, a static-site generator. The talk will address how both sites did it, and points that may be challenging relative to working with Drupal. No previous coding experience required!