Drupal powers many of the College of Engineering's websites, providing a robust content management system for our digital presence. To ensure our users receive the most current and accurate information, we grant contributors access to edit content relevant to their job functions.
We're excited to introduce you to our new Drupal 2.0 interface. This recent project by the CoE web team offers a more streamlined and user-friendly experience for contributors across the College of Engineering. The enhanced editing interface simplifies content management, making it easier to keep our websites up to date.
Currently, this upgrade is only available for the College of Engineering website and select departments. If you are a staff member from A&A, CEE, or ME, please follow the training process below. If you are MSE, ISE, or ChemE staff, please fill out this form.
Drupal 2.0 training process
1. Complete form
Fill out this form to help tailor our Drupal training to your needs.
2. Watch video
- For editors (7 minutes)
- For publishers (8 minutes)
- (Which user type should I be?)
3. Read documentation
- Accessibility best practices (7 minute read)
- Content management best practices (5 minute read)
- Brand at the UW (6 minute read)
4. Take assessment
The assessment is followed by a website collaborator agreement.
Once you complete the assessment, please email webhelp@engr.washington.edu with your score.
Frequently asked questions
Which user type should I be?
Our content management system (CMS) has two levels of access, which will cover 95% of contributors.
- Editors have access to make edits, but their updates require having a Publisher or Admin review them before publishing. This helps to add a layer of change management and quality control.
- Publishers have access to make and publish their own edits, create new pages, and publish news articles. However, they should not access or change menus, blocks, or navigation structures.
The other 5% of users are Admins. These users have access to create and publish content, including changes to pages, blocks, and navigation structures. Communication managers and other website administrators (such as Communications or IT staff) can also receive this level of access.
Content management best practices
"Body" page content
highlighted by border
Editable website sections
- Editors and publishers should focus their edits on the “body” of the web content.
- Our websites have many different components, which should only be edited by web specialists or those familiar with website management.
- We strongly encourage you to focus your edits on ensuring that a page’s content is accurate and up-to-date. To request changes to the page structure or design, please email webhelp@engr.washington.edu or a web specialist. We are happy to collaborate with you on that level of changes, or partner with a web administrator to do so for you.
- Avoid changing page titles or URLs. Before making those kinds of changes, please email webhelp@engr.washington.edu for further guidance.
Creating new pages
Although Publishers have access to create new pages, we strongly encourage you to contact a member of the web team before creating new content. We can guide website architecture, content organization, navigation structures, and menus to ensure users can benefit from consistent experiences throughout our websites.
Adding files, photos and links
The website is intended to share content with large, broad audiences. Our storage systems should not be used as a content repository for photos or videos. There are different solutions to sharing this type of content for smaller audiences. For more information, please email webhelp@engr.washington.edu
If your PDFs and files are meant for broad audiences and we hold the copyright to the content, you can find more information about adding them to the website in the Drupal manual. An important note about copyright: we should never host copies of educational journals that are meant for single use only. Re-sharing licensed content is copyright infringement.
PDFs should always be reviewed for accessibility prior to sharing them online.
If you are adding a photo to a page, make sure that we have permission to share it either through a written consent form or a receipt that shows we have purchased the image or hold the copyright to it in some way.
It's also best practice to resize photos for web use. Using the highest-resolution version of a photo can lead to slow loading times and web performance issues.
Be mindful of which links you use within your content. If you copied and pasted the link from an email from Outlook or Marketo, the URL may have additional parameters, such as tracking links, that should be removed before adding them to the website. Not doing this will result in broken links.
You should always be judicious when linking to external websites outside of the UW. Are the websites regularly maintained and of good reputation? Do they have ads and other content we would not want to be linking to?
Content ownership
When you submit a new user request through our registration form, you will be asked which pages you want to edit. A member of the web team will confirm which areas you can update. This could range from a few pages to an entire website section.
If you require an update outside of the set of pages you own, you must email webhelp@engr.washington.edu to request those changes.
Security, custom code and features
- Do not add special code such as custom HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to any of our pages. This could pose a significant security risk for our websites. If you require custom code included on your pages, please contact webhelp@engr.washington.edu
- Our Drupal installation is managed centrally by the College of Engineering Computing Services team in partnership with the College Marketing and Communications team. Any requests for new features outside our theme should be made to webhelp@engr.washington.edu so we can assess the request and align it with current priorities, impact, and resources.
Analytics and data (Coming soon!)
Need help?
If you need help with involved updates or have any questions regarding training, the web team is happy to assist.