A message from Greg Smith, director, departmental and campus applications (IST)
Alpha testing begins
I’m pleased to announce the start of testing for the University’s next generation web platform, WCMS 3. Over the next four months, the WCMS 3 project team will lead campus web administrators, who have graciously volunteered their time, in a total of five rounds of Alpha and Beta testing. This testing is critical to identifying bugs and informing refinements that cannot be identified through our automatic testing processes. When released on April 26, 2021, the foundation of WCMS 3 will continue to be built upon, adding new features and functionality with an initial emphasis on all the core and custom functionality required to complete migrations from WCMS 2 to WCMS 3 by November 2022.
Thank you
I wanted to recognize the many years of work that the WCMS team has invested in the WCMS 3 platform to get us to this point. The team of talented developers and support staff have transitioned their work to the entirely new codebase, platform, and architecture of WCMS 3, all while continuing to maintain and evolve our legacy WCMS 2 platform. I’m grateful to everyone involved with the WCMS 3 project for their dedication and perseverance to get us to this exciting milestone.
Pantheon and our Journey to the Cloud
A notable change with WCMS 3 is our use of a Platform-as-a-Service Drupal hosting provider, Pantheon. Engaging with Pantheon will yield both technological advantages and time savings, as well as faster worldwide access to Waterloo websites. This move to the Pantheon cloud platform is aligned with IST’s Journey to the Cloud.
I encourage you to visit the Building the next WCMS website to learn more about the Alpha/Beta testing process, review the known changes coming with the next WCMS, and get in touch with any questions or comments you may have about this project.