Shutdown of the CST Drupal 7 web server

The UIS Drupal 7 web service, which has hosted the departmental web site https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/ since the site was moved there between 2018 and 2020, will shut down by 10 December 2026. The department is moving its web site back onto its own filer-hosted web server.

What this means for you

Pages maintained by the department's administrative staff are moved for you: work is currently underway to migrate hundreds of departmental web pages, news items and associated files from Drupal 7 to the filer-hosted site.

Personal, research-group, project and event pages are not part of that migration: their owners should move them themselves, ideally before 10 December 2026. Nothing is lost if that date passes – we keep backups of the Drupal site, from which pages can still be recovered afterwards – and pagemaster can help with the transfer.

The Drupal 7 server may briefly remain available as www2.cst.cam.ac.uk after the switch, as another place to copy the text of your old pages from.

Why we are moving back in house

The UIS-offered successor system, Cambridge Web Platform, is significantly more restricted than the service we have now: it offers only a WYSIWYG editor, with no access to the HTML source, and therefore no custom CSS or <script> elements either. Like many other science and technology departments, we have therefore decided to move back to an in-house web server.

The plan

We are moving back to the long-established static-file site on our filer-hosted in-house Apache web server, which has hosted https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ since 1993. In early December 2026 we plan to rename that server from www.cl.cam.ac.uk to www.cst.cam.ac.uk, restoring its role as the main departmental web site. Requests to www.cl.cam.ac.uk will then be redirected to the new name, so most existing links should keep working.

The central migration focuses on the content maintained by the department's administrative staff, which before the move to Drupal was already kept in a Subversion repository at svn+ssh:[Javascript required]/vh-cl/trunk/html.

Moving personal profile pages

The content of the Drupal profile pages currently hosted under https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/crsid will not be migrated for you, and the department will have nothing comparable in place by 10 December 2026. Whether it will offer a new staff-profile system later remains open.

So to stay visible on the departmental web site, you have two options:

• Create a public_html/ folder in your home directory /homes/crsid/ on the filer and put a file index.html there. It will be served at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~crsid/ (under the hostname in use today). That folder holds not just your pages, but also any material you want to publish alongside them, such as paper drafts. Personal web pages explains how to set this up.
• If your home page is elsewhere, redirect to it from a public_html/.htaccess file:

  Redirect temp /~crsid/ https://www.example.org/my-home-page/
  

  which sends anything below /~crsid/ to the corresponding place at the other site. Keep that redirect a temporary one, so that you remain free to change the arrangement later; Leaving the department explains the main options.

Examples of some styles of personal web pages: aac10, afb21, ah12, ah793, arb33, cb210, mgk25, rkm38, rnw24.

You are free to choose the content and style of your pages, whether plain and simple, elaborate and elegant, or in one of the University house styles.

Moving research-group, project and event pages

These all work the same way: a folder on the filer, writable by the people who maintain the pages. First check whether your group already has such a folder, and a Unix group to go with it:

$ ls -l /anfs/www/html/research/
drwxrwsr-x 11 jgd1000    ai-web       4096 Dec 23  2020 ai
[...]

$ getent group | grep -- -web
ai-web:*:583:btd26,cd200,cm772,…
clash-web:*:9625:jv258
dtg-web:*:3604:arb33,rkh23
nlip-web:*:523:aac10,apc38,ejb1,…
pls-web:*:518:cm772,jv258,pes20
rainbow-web:*:525:afb21,am2806,hg410,…
sec-web:*:532:ap2453,at2008,mgk25,…

If not, pagemaster can create a folder for you under /anfs/www/html/research/ – or, for conference and workshop pages, under /anfs/www/html/events/, alongside the many already at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/. Ask service-desk to create the Unix group if more than two people need write access; two can share a folder through the personal group of one of them.

Examples of filer-hosted research-group pages: ai, rainbow, security, srg.

Again, groups have a free choice of styling and tooling. Many apply a University house style using Ucampas. Some use a version-control system (RCS, Subversion, Git). Two groups (security and rainbow) currently use Subversion as a content-management system in the same way as the main departmental pages do (but in separate repositories).

This setup provides pre- and post-commit scripts that check integrity, email change notifications and run Ucampas after every commit. With SVNEdit there is now also a basic in-browser editor.

Choosing URLs that survive the rename

Avoid absolute URLs containing the hostname www.cl.cam.ac.uk, as it will eventually change to www.cst.cam.ac.uk; use relative URLs where practical.