Choosing the YaleSites platform is the easiest and most reliable way for Yale groups conducting official university business to upgrade or to build a new website.
However, some groups may choose to build a custom website with either internal staff resources or by engaging a third-party vendor. This option is a significant endeavor that comes with responsibilities. To assist in your decision, we’ve detailed more information about the platform as well as several important considerations:
- About the Latest YaleSites Platform
- Engaging Third-Party Support for YaleSites
- Contributing to the YaleSites Platform
- Requirements for Hosting Custom Drupal Websites on Pantheon
About the Latest YaleSites Platform
The latest version of the YaleSites platform differs from previous versions of the offering. The open-source content management system Drupal is still used as the basis for the offering, but the new platform provides more out-of-the-box features for supporting visually rich and engaging content without needing technical expertise.
In the past, adding features to a YaleSite oftentimes required technical knowledge to achieve site goals. Site owners who pursued these customizations frequently introduced branding, identity, and accessibility issues to the site. The new platform no longer supports this type of customization.
As site owners identify new features they’d like to see on the platform, those ideas are brought to the YaleSites team for consideration in our product roadmap. The YaleSites team is constantly adding new features to the platform based on the needs of the community of site owners. All features are assured to meet Yale branding, identity, and accessibility standards. Once added to the platform, new features become available for any site on the platform to use.
Benefits of using YaleSites
- Cost-effectiveness: YaleSites is a free offering for sites used to support official university business. Building custom websites from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming.
- Standardization and consistency: With YaleSites it is easy to maintain Yale branding and visual identity. Your site will have a look and feel consistent with other Yale web properties, making it easier for site visitors to find the information they are looking for. Maintaining conformance with web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) is greatly simplified since accessibility is embedded in the design, the platform, and the content editing experience.
- Centralized management: YaleSites is centrally managed, so you don’t need to worry about updating and securing your site. With custom built sites, you assume responsibility for updating to new versions of the content management system and applying security updates.
- Reduced technical expertise required: YaleSites has prioritized simplifying the authoring experience by providing user-friendly tools and templates. Unlike building a custom website, a site built on YaleSites can be done without dedicated IT support.
- Scalability: YaleSites is designed to handle a large number of websites and provides hosting resources appropriate to the size of each site, making it easier to scale as the number of internal groups and their website needs grow.
Challenges of Building Custom Websites
- High cost and time investment: Building custom websites from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming, requiring significant resources and expertise.
- Maintenance and updates: You will need to handle ongoing maintenance, updates, and security patches for custom websites, which can be a significant burden. Groups with custom websites built by third-party agencies are expected to maintain a support agreement with those agencies to manage updates and other improvements.
- Lack of standardization: Without a centralized platform, maintaining consistent branding and visual identity across custom websites can be challenging. Implementing accessible websites that conform to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard is also challenging and often not done well.
- Technical expertise required: Yale groups that build a custom website will need to have or acquire specialized technical expertise to build and maintain custom websites, including expert understanding of web accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA).
Engaging Third-Party Support for YaleSites
While YaleSites is intended as a self-service option, some groups who want a new site on the platform may not have the time to build it themselves. They may want to hire a third-party individual or agency to help them build on the platform.
How Vendor Support for YaleSites Has Changed
New sites on the YaleSites platform now differ from previous YaleSites versions. All customizations to a site must be done using features that are already part of the platform. The many built-in features on the new platform allow customization options to support creative and unique designs. Implications for working with a vendor to build on the new platform include:
- Design: Vendors often propose new designs for content types, layouts, and page components. This approach is an important step for a custom website build but is largely unnecessary for sites built on YaleSites. Vendors should utilize the existing Yale Design System as the basis for understanding design options that are supported on the platform.
- Content: Vendors hired to build on the platform should focus on helping their clients organize, write, and present compelling content, using existing platform features.
- New Features: If vendors find that there are limitations to the platform that do not allow them to meet client needs, they can share those needs with the YaleSites team to determine if future planned work will meet those needs or if new features should be added to the product roadmap.
- Development: Vendors with sufficient expertise programming websites on the Drupal 10 platform may consider contributing new features to the platform. The skills necessary for contributing to the platform are outlined below.
Contributing to the YaleSites Platform
YaleSites is an open-source project and welcomes contributions from partners with the necessary technical skills. The code for the platform is complex and spans multiple repositories. Vendors or individuals who want to contribute new or updated features need to have a high level of technical expertise with Drupal and related technologies:
- Expertise with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript.
- Experience with moderately complex git workflows.
- Expertise with Drupal 10 and related composer-based build tools.
- Use of local development tools including Docker and Lando/DDEV.
- Designs are implemented as components using Storybook (component-library-twig).
For more information, see the developer documentation (README) at the yalesites-project repository.
Requirements for Hosting Custom Drupal Websites on Pantheon
If you choose to pursue building a custom website using the Drupal CMS, ITS does offer robust hosting of custom Drupal websites on the Pantheon platform. Hosting a custom site comes with significant expectations related to technical expertise needed by site builders and maintainers. ITS does not provide ongoing support for updating custom sites, so site owners must maintain a support agreement with a vendor or identify other resources to support ongoing updates and changes to the site, including regularly applying security patches. To be eligible for hosting a custom Drupal site on Pantheon, groups must follow the guidelines outlined here: