Background

info

See the following presentation about WordPress and the process which led to its adoption: Why WordPress

This page summarises key findings from the Web and Drupal Infrastructure Teams' work during 2022-2023, which established the Web Governance structure and led to the Web Governance Board's decision to adopt WordPress as CERN's future content management system and foundation for its web presence.

This work had two key goals:

• to assess our current web ecosystem after decades of organic website development, identifying both successes and challenges; and
• to develop a comprehensive strategy for CERN's entire web presence, from flagship sites to specialized and individual websites.

CERN websites serve as crucial channels for achieving the Organization's strategic objectives and communications goals. They enable meaningful stakeholder engagement and represent CERN to all audiences—both internal and external—making them vital to our long-term mission and an essential component of our broader communication strategy.

Governance

A robust, long-term strategy for CERN's web presence starts with governance.

An illustration of all Drupal websites on CERN's infrastructure as of May 3rd 2023. The left-hand side shows departments; the middle shows groups; and the right-hand side shows individial namespaces containing one or more publicly accessible websites. Generated by Rajula Vineet Reddy and Joachim Valdemar Yde (2023).

The above illustration of CERN's website ecosystem and interdependencies, prepared for the 328th Enlarged Directorate Meeting in July 2023, provided a comprehensive overview of the Organization's web presence at the time. During this meeting, the Enlarged Directorate approved and established a federated CERN Web Governance Structure, comprising three tiers:

• Web Governance Board
• Web Presence Committee
• Departmental Web Representatives

The Web Governance Board's initial priority was to evaluate and select an appropriate content management system for CERN.

See https://governance.web.cern.ch/ for more information.

Why WordPress

In 2023, CERN managed over 1200 publicly accessible Drupal websites. The continuous maintenance and support requirements demanded by Drupal as our content management system incurs significant costs, both direct and indirect. Drupal's biannual major releases (such as Drupal 10 and subsequent versions), for instance, impact all websites and demand substantial resources across the Organization for successful implementation. Increasing security requirements and frequent backward-incompatible changes to both Drupal itself and individual modules further complicate matters and strain day-to-day operations.

Ultimately, the resource requirements per website are directly correlated with the amount of customisation. Approximately 53% of CERN websites feature customisations, many of which are extensive and poorly documented. We are thus dealing with an inherently complex and challenging ecosystem further strained by the weight of extensive CERN-specific customisation, increasing maintenance and necessary support work. As an example, the relatively straightforward migration to Drupal 9 required more than 8.4 FTEs beyond centralised resources. An assessment of Drupal's continued suitability for CERN's needs was warranted.

To evaluate alternatives, the following content management systems were assessed:

• WordPress (used by 63% of websites with content management systems¹);
• Wix (5.9%);
• Squarespace (3.0%); and
• Joomla (2.6%).

While other platforms exist, such as Weebly and TYPO3, our evaluation focused on dedicated content management systems with greater market share than Drupal (1.6%). Given the challenges stemming from Drupal's diminishing ecosystem, we prioritised alternatives with robust and growing communities.

The evaluation assessed WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Joomla against two sets of criteria: those originally established during the ENTICE meetings² that led to Drupal's adoption, and new requirements developed through consultation with the CERN community.

Requirement	State
	pre-Drupal	Drupal	WordPress	Wix	Squarespace	Joomla
clear URLs and structure
avoid data duplication
web accessiblity			with plugin	partial	partial
navigation (find correct resource)		partial	partial	partial	partial	partial
search (find correct resource faster)
enforceable design guidelines		partial		restricted*	restricted*	partial
enforceable governance		partial	†	partial	partial	partial
easy content management system	N/A	partial
easy to edit content by end-users		partial				partial
reduce maintenance work				managed	managed
transparency of content and files	direct	invisible	partial	partial	partial	invisible
reasonable learning curve	shallow	steep	shallow	shallow	shallow	steep
integrate with SSO, CDS, Indico, ...				limited*	limited*
healthy ecosystem	N/A	deterioating	healthy	healthy	healthy	deterioating

*Both Wix and Squarespace lock websites to their proprietary hosting and infrastructure environments. This imposes restrictions on both which design guidelines can be enforced and which governance elements can be enforced programmatically. Similarly, integrations with CERN components such as the CERN SSO, CDS, and Indico are all complicated by the reduced flexibility present in both solutions. Additionally, these drawbacks do not account for any security challenges such a configuration would introduce. †The degree to which governance can be enforced programmatically with WordPress depends on the infrastructure.

Among these alternatives, WordPress emerged as the most viable option. Wix and Squarespace, whilst effective for small to medium-sized websites, are tightly coupled to their proprietary hosting and infrastructure platforms. This dependency would not only create vendor lock-in but also complicate integration with crucial CERN systems such as Single Sign-On (SSO), CDS, and Indico. Joomla, despite offering the required integration capabilities, presents an even steeper learning curve than Drupal while sharing many of its limitations.

WordPress was therefore selected to replace Drupal. This decision is supported not only by our internal evaluation and feasibility study but also by WordPress's widespread adoption among high-profile websites that collectively receive billions of annual visits, including:

• https://www.nasa.gov/ (moved from Drupal to WordPress in 2023)
• https://www.whitehouse.gov/ (WordPress since 2018)
• https://www.fnal.gov/ (WordPress since 2014)
• https://www.embl.org/ (moved from Drupal to WordPress in 2021)
• https://www.ca.gov/ (official homepage of the state of California)
• https://sweden.se/ (official homepage of Sweden)
• https://www.ipcc.ch/ (one of several United Nations agencies)

Additionally, several CERN websites use WordPress already:

• https://lhcb-outreach.web.cern.ch/ (LHCb’s Outreach)
• https://computing-blog.web.cern.ch/ (IT’s Computing Blog)
• https://qtml-2023.web.cern.ch/ (QTML 2023)
• https://cerncourier.com/ (the CERN Courier)

Both maintaining Drupal and migrating to WordPress involve significant costs. However, continuing with Drupal would lead to progressively increasing expenses due to growing maintenance and compatibility requirements.

WordPress, whilst requiring an initial investment, offers long-term cost reduction across development, maintenance, and daily operations. Moreover, WordPress's intuitive interface empowers users to focus on content creation as opposed to web development.

What about Drupal?

All Drupal websites which require a content management system will be migrated to WordPress. No website will be served on WordPress before it has been verified and approved. Drupal itself will continue to be supported and maintained throughout 2024 and 2025.

Drupal's decommission is scheduled for early 2026.

Footnotes

1. See https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management; quoted numbers from December 2024. ↩

2. See all ENTICE meetings at https://indico.cern.ch/category/3101/. ↩