Higher Education

Drupal Certified Partner for higher education

Course catalogs, research sites, departmental rollups, admissions funnels — DoodleWeb builds and migrates Drupal for universities and colleges across North America.

Multi-site and departmental Drupal architecture
SSO with Okta, Azure AD, Shibboleth
Course catalog and student-portal integrations
WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility for OCR / DOJ compliance

Scope your project

The higher education Drupal architecture we recommend

Most institutions do best on a single Drupal 11 platform with domain separation rather than dozens of disconnected installs. One codebase means one security patch cycle, one accessibility baseline and one upgrade path.

Shared content model: program, course, person, news, event, story.
Component library in Layout Builder with locked spacing, type scale and color tokens.
Per unit roles and moderation states matched to how approvals actually happen.
Central rollups for news, events, people and program search.
Search on Apache Solr once you pass a few thousand nodes.

Migration from Drupal 7 without losing search rankings

Drupal 7 reached end of life on January 5, 2025. Catalog and program pages are usually a university's highest ranking URLs, so the migration plan starts from the URL map, not the design.

We inventory every URL, map old to new, write the redirects before any code runs, verify redirect coverage on staging, and re-index search before the DNS change. Rankings drop when redirects are an afterthought, not because the CMS changed.

Keep reading

Higher Education Drupal questions, answered

Why do universities use Drupal instead of WordPress?

Drupal handles complex structured content, granular permissions, multilingual content and multi-site governance natively. Those are exactly the demands of a university with thousands of program, course and people records and dozens of editing units.

Can Drupal integrate with Banner, Colleague or Workday?

Yes. We integrate the student information system so course, program and term data syncs into Drupal, with the SIS remaining the system of record and Drupal presenting the data.

How do you meet WCAG 2.2 AA on a university site?

Accessibility is built into the component library rather than tested at the end. Automated axe and Pa11y run on key templates each release, manual NVDA and VoiceOver checks cover admissions, catalog and giving flows, and every finding is documented for your evidence trail.

What does a higher ed Drupal migration cost?

It depends on how much custom code survives and how many content types need custom migration plugins. Discovery produces a module by module keep, replace or drop decision with hours attached, so the budget request holds up in committee.

Can departments still control their own content?

Yes. Departmental autonomy comes from editorial roles and moderation workflows, not from separate installations. Units edit their own content inside guardrails that keep branding and accessibility consistent.

Do you support the site after launch?

Yes. Maintenance plans cover core and contrib security patching inside a published SLA window, daily off-site backups with restore drills, uptime and Core Web Vitals monitoring, accessibility regression checks and a monthly change request budget.

A DoodleWeb product

Site Sonar
for your Drupal site

Your Drupal site already ranks. The question in 2026 is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude name you when a buyer asks their question. Site Sonar makes sure they do — and proves it with real Google Search Console and Analytics data.

1. Find the questions

The exact prompts your buyers ask AI

Built from your ICP, your buying committee's real questions, Google Search Console data, and live autocomplete. Not guesses — every tracked query shows where it came from.

2. Check the engines daily

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude

SiteSonar runs your queries every day and records whether the engines name you, who they name instead, and which sources they cite as evidence.

3. Fix the gaps

The Content Gap agent drafts the answer

It scores how well your site answers each buyer question, writes the missing answer pages with FAQ + schema built to be quoted, and pushes them through your approval flow. Nothing publishes without a human yes.

4. Prove it moved

Real Google data, not our own scorecard

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are wired in, so you watch citations turn into impressions and into actual visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and gemini.

Monitoring tools stop at the dashboard. SiteSonar acts.

It drafts the fix, publishes it to WordPress, GitHub, or any CMS, and re-checks until the citation appears.

Action-level guidance, not vanity scores

Example: "reply to this exact Reddit thread ChatGPT cites when answering your buyer's question" — with the link.

The 90-day guarantee

We lock your baseline in writing on day one. You see the number every month. If measurable AI visibility hasn't improved in 90 days, you don't pay. Nobody else in the category takes that risk.

Try Site Sonar free How Site Sonar works

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Tell us about your Higher Education Drupal project

We reply within one business day. No spam, no sales calls without your ask.

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