Drupal Content Management System Hosting

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that was selected as NCAR and UCAR's official CMS by the Web Advisory Group. It is intended primarily for creating public-facing websites that need a refined look. This is achieved using Drupal's extensive theming capabilities which enable web developers to create a custom look and feel for their website. The Web Engineering Group provides hosting for Drupal sites and also provides a template site as a starting point for development which has switchable themes for UCAR and NCAR.

WEG hosts Drupal using a stack of services which help increase the security and stability of Drupal. Hardened-PHP, also known as Suhosin, patches security vulnerabilities in the PHP language Drupal is written in.

Each Drupal site is it's own standalone instance of Drupal with it's own lightweight web server (nginx) running in a virtual server (Linux Vserver) running the Ubuntu Linux operating system. All of these layers provide separation between Drupal sites so that if one site becomes unstable for any reason, it will not affect others.

A Debian package management system enables the WEG to push out updates and security patches to all Drupal sites on a regular basis. The WEG updates Drupal core and the set of contributed modules (like extensions or plugins) provided by the template site. Developers can install additional modules which they are responsible for keeping updated themselves.

Finally, cluster management provides for failover in the case of a serious hardware or software failure, switching sites on the failed server over to a working server.

Please login to the Drupal Demo Site with your UCAS password to experiment with Drupal yourself. You can also submit a work request for a Drupal site.