Web Editor Lockdown Starts Monday

We’re in the home stretch in preparing to launch the new pacificu.edu website! The Office of Marketing & Communications has been working on a ground-up rebuild of the university’s website, including a transition from on-site to cloud-based hosting and a platform upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This rebuild includes a complete overhaul of top-level landing pages, admissions-driven content and academic landing pages. It focuses heavily on optimizing content on the university’s website to drive search traffic to support student recruitment, and it also implements best practices to achieve accessibility of the site.

Preview & Launch Timeline

We anticipate a pre-launch preview for all Pacific employees in the next two to three weeks. The exact date will be contingent on the completion of work by a third-party contractor, who is helping to bring the technical aspects of the rebuild to fruition.

Employees will have about one week to review and test the site in order to identify critical errors or broken links before launch. 

Following the public launch of the site, we anticipate one to two weeks of emergency-only updates while we troubleshoot any errors created by the platform and hosting site migrations. During this time, search results may also be imperfect as Google and our internal search platform re-index contents.

Editing Access

In preparation for this final stretch, we will be turning off all web editor access on Monday. Many web editors had access turned off earlier in the process. Monday’s update will remove access to those who retained editing privileges for “last minute” changes, as well as access to individual employee webpages.

This lockdown is necessary to ensure that all changes that have been made on the live site in the past several months are synced to the new site. (We have been working to match changes in real-time, effectively running two parallel websites, but there are about 200 pages remaining that need to be manually synced.)

Students and employees will continue to be able to submit news and calendar events during this time. Critical accreditation and/or admissions-related edits can be requested via the web request form. Any non-critical change requests will be paused until post-launch.