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 ~2020, will shut down sometime around the end of 2026.
The UIS-offered successor system, Cambridge Web Platform, is a significantly more restricted service than what we had so far (e.g., no HTML editing possible). Like many other science and technology departments, we decided, therefore, to migrate back to an in-house web server.
The current plan is to migrate back to the long-term static-file site on our filer-hosted in-house Apache web server, which has hosted https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ since 1993. The plan is to rename that web server's hostname in late 2026 from www.cl.cam.ac.uk to www.cst.cam.ac.uk, to restore its role as the main departmental web site. All URLs to www.cl.cam.ac.uk will then redirect to its new name www.cst.cam.ac.uk. The old Drupal 7 server will briefly remain available as www2.cst.cam.ac.uk.
Work is currently underway to migrate hundreds of departmental web pages, news items and associated files from Drupal 7 onto the filer-hosted site. This work focusses on content maintained by the department's administrative staff, which had already been maintained in a Subversion repository at svn+ssh:[Javascript required]/vh-cl/trunk/html.
Out of scope for this central migration are personal, research-group-, project- and event-specific pages, which owners can directly rebuild and maintain via NFS on the filer.
Moving personal profile pages
We are not going to preserve for you the content of the Drupal profile pages currently hosted under https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/crsid.
Instead, you can create on the filer a public_html/ folder in your /homes/crsid/ home directory, and create there a file index.html, which will then be served at (currently) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~crsid/.
Examples of some styles of personal web pages: aac10, afb21, ah12, ah793, arb33, mgk25, rkm38, rnw24.
You can freely choose the content and style of web pages as you prefer, whether you like them plain and simple, elaborate and elegant, or in one of the University house styles.
You may want to avoid absolute URLs involving the hostname www.cl.cam.ac.uk, as this will eventually change to www.cst.cam.ac.uk. You may want to use relative URLs instead, where practical.
Moving research-group pages
For research-group pages, pagemaster can create for you a folder under /anfs/www/html/research/.
Also contact service-desk to create a Unix group for you containing all the people involved in maintaining your web pages.
But first check if such a group or folder already exists:
$ getent group | grep -- -web ai-web:*:583:btd26,cd200,cm772,mj201,pl219,sbh11,tms41,zs315 clash-web:*:9625:jv258 dtg-web:*:3604:arb33,rkh23 nlip-web:*:523:aac10,apc38,ejb1,mf501,mr472,sht25 pls-web:*:518:cm772,jv258,pes20 rainbow-web:*:525:afb21,am2806,hg410,ma905,pmh64,rkm38,wwwupdate sec-web:*:532:ap2453,at2008,mgk25,tm794,wwwupdate $ ls -l /anfs/www/html/research/
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). Currently two groups (security and rainbow) 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 perform automatic integrity checks, email change notification and invocation of Ucampas following any commit. With SVNEdit there is now also a basic in-browser editor.
Moving event pages
If you have conference/workshop web pages, we can likewise create a folder for you under /anfs/www/html/events/ to join the many others already there at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/.