The web content management system WordPress is now available for websites across the Organization.

This milestone follows extensive development work and close collaboration between the International Relations and Information Technology departments over the past year, under the guidance of the Web Governance Board. Officially replacing Drupal as CERN's official content management system, WordPress represents a significant enhancement to our broader web presence, providing users with access to a powerful and modern system that prioritises responsiveness and accessibility alongside easy content creation.

At its core, WordPress at CERN is designed to transform the experience of website owners from being web developers to being content creators, allowing them to focus on what really matters: the content. Interested CERN account holders can create a WordPress website today via the Web Services Portal, in line with the frameworks in place.

With the release of WordPress, the creation of new Drupal websites has now been disabled. Starting this summer and running throughout 2025, existing Drupal websites that conform to the centralised CERN Drupal Distribution setup will be automatically migrated to WordPress. Customised websites will be treated on a case-by-case basis. All Drupal website owners have been contacted, and further communication will follow.

Additional information about WordPress and the upcoming migration can be found in the official WordPress documentation https://wordpress.docs.cern.ch/. Information about web governance at CERN can be found at https://governance.web.cern.ch/.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress Lite is now available for eligible use-cases, under moderation by each department's Web Representative. WordPress Lite is a CERN made and lightweight version of WordPress, offering an initial set of plugins and the first version of our official CERN WordPress theme running on the existing app-catalogue infrastructure.

This offering aims at providing a simple and accessible way for website owners in need of WordPress to familiarise themselves with WordPress until the central infrastructure is available.

It is a limited, temporary solution, only available for those with urgent needs.

All WordPress websites will need to be migrated to the central WordPress version once available. The migration is expected to be automated - but we cannot offer guarantees at this stage. Once applicable, individual website owners will be contacted with more information.

Please check the dedicated section to the roadmap to see the updates to the plans and timelines.

We will go over these details in the Community Meeting of 26th September via Zoom.

We write this news to share that the presentation at the Enlarged Directorate, on March 5th 2024, on the topic of “Web presence, Governance and Drupal to WordPress migration” was very well-received. A decision to move have WordPress as the new CMS centrally provided at CERN has been approved. This decision implies as well a move from Drupal to WordPress, followed by a Drupal decommission at CERN. Given the additional resources needed for this project, in order to develop the infrastructure in house and support the migration for Drupal and WordPress websites, new resources will be requested (Q3/Q4 onwards). However, work is already starting on the preparations of the new infrastructure.