Website definitions

Drupal is content management software. It is free and open-source. It has a large, supportive community of developers.

Drupal is used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites.

Some knowledge of Drupal is useful for managing a Webspark site, although theoretically it would not be essential. You can find out how to do just about anything in Drupal through a YouTube video, documentation on the Drupal site, or by just using a web search.

Pantheon is a company that hosts sites built on Drupal or WordPress. It offers workflow tools that provide for a secure and agile method of developing, testing, and launching sites. Once a site is launched, the same workflow provides a safe way of making changes to the tools that are included in the CMS (in our case, Webspark).

ASU contracts with Pantheon to host Webspark sites. There is a per-site fee for sites that are "live". ASURA pays that fee to ASU's UTO. 

A person with an @asu.edu email address can create a free account on Pantheon. The account includes the ability to create up to 7 free "sandbox" sites. ASURA used a sandbox site on Connie McNeill's Pantheon account to develop the initial public site and the initial site for volunteers. Each site can have team members assigned to it by the account holder. The ASURA sites have the following team members in addition to Connie:

• [email protected] (but there is no associated Pantheon account established for this address)
• Paul Harper
• Barry McNeill

The UTO should be contacted when it becomes necessary to change the "user in charge" for one of the ASURA sites from Connie McNeill to someone else.

Initial site creation

1. Establish a personal account with Pantheon, which uses an @asu.edu email address. The account has a dashboard that allows a site to be created. 
2. When creating a new site, specify that the site is affiliated with ASU, you want the site to be Webspark2, etc. See the Webspark article on the ASU Enterprise Brand and Marketing Guide for details.
3. Initially, the site created is a copy of the current release of Webspark 2. Obviously, once we start using it and adding content, it is no longer a direct copy of the original Webspark 2, but is an extension of that. 
4. We can add our own Drupal modules if we need/want to for features that are available but not supplied by Webspark. 

When a sandbox site is ready to launch, the procedure is to:

• Choose a domain name for the site. Since we have a base site of asura.asu.edu, new ASURA sites likely should be subdomains, i.e. newstuff-asura.asu.edu.. Request the name from the UTO. The request will need approval from the ASURA Business Manager.
• Review a checklist for conformance to standards, Make any changes to the site that are indicated by the review.
• Submit a request to launch the new site to the UTO. The billing contact you will use is the ASURA Business Manager, so that person should be aware of what you are doing, and can provide the necessary Cost Center ID and Program ID. The pricing is on the form. Any ASURA site will almost certainly be "Basic".
• The UTO works with Pantheon to launch the live site.  Once a site is live, it can be backed up nightly automatically.

Pantheon environments

Once established, we actually have three copies of our site on Pantheon: Development, Test and Live.

• The first is where we can try out any new Drupal modules that we want to install. Once we are satisfied that we do want the added modules, we follow a process to "push" the changes through to the test environment.
• There we review the changes using the same content and files that are in use in the Live environment.
• If all is well, we continue the process to push the changes through to the Live site. Once we are using the Live site, we make all content changes there – i.e., update the web pages there. We can copy our live site back down to development and test any time we want.

Through Pantheon we can apply updates supplied by ASU to our copy of Drupal – these typically are updated Drupal modules, even the Drupal core, but also include added or updated features, and changes to styles to conform to branding standards.

If the ASU-supplied update creates problems on our development site, a ticket to UTO about it is submitted.  Once the ticket is submitted you have to wait for UTO to deal with the problem before pushing the changes on through to production.