When I say that a webpage speaks a lot about its owner, be it a company, a government agency, a project or a person, I am not talking about its contents and layout. I am referring to many things that become explicit when approaching the process of crafting a page for any of them.

Issues such as governance, information and communication policy (if it exists, how it is and how it is actually applied), willingness to innovate, technological mastery, organisational capacity and management of presence in the virtual world, interpersonal relationships at work... Trust me, the list of what comes under the rug is considerable.

Another thing that became very clear to me and that I started shouting everywhere was the composition of the team, or the skills of someone who will develop and implement a web project for any of the types of clients listed above. In addition to the designer, the information architect, the programmer, the copywriter, the illustrator, the editor, and the marketing guy, I would add the psychologist. But while it's important to understand why, let's leave it as a joke for now. We'll talk about that in another article, shall we?

First, let me introduce myself and tell you what I'm actually doing here. I have a degree in journalism and a master's degree in communication, both degrees obtained at the University of Brasília (UnB), which is located in the capital of Brazil. So, I present my disclaimer right away: I love the University of Brasília. Very much indeed. And I keep saying that it contains, proportionally, everything wonderful and everything atrophied that exists in Brazil.

The struggle to be present on the web

I was working, on a temporary basis, with the commission that coordinated the commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of this same university. It was the year 2012, Joomla had just released its 3 series version and my job was inside the Communication Department at UnB. As soon as I joined the team, I was informed that the hot site for the university's 50th anniversary celebrations was ready and had been developed in Joomla (2.X), by an external company, following the guidelines of today's Information Technology Secretariat, STI-UnB.

Hurray! I thought to myself. The intelligence signs of my dear university were also manifesting themselves in the institution's web management sector. I had known about Joomla since the days when it went by the name Mambo. I never understood anything about programming code, but I needed a CMS for the institutions where I worked and, after a lot of research, I arrived at the Joomla we know today.

But the digital reality at UnB turned out to be much different than what I perceived initially. The institution's own page was based on a CMS patch (Cake PhP), adapted by a small group of programmers in 2003, in a disruptive but quixotic initiative by the then dean. Despite being extremely limited, the publisher was used by the Secretariat of Communication for almost 15 years. Until, in 2014, for those reasons that only so-called destiny knows, I became the head of the Communication Secretariat.

What sort of lemonade can we make with this banana?

I knew my passage through coordination would be quick, so I concentrated on redesigning the university's page, rescuing its presence on the world wide web from medieval times to the modern world of categories, tabs, related content, image and video galleries and a multitude of possibilities already available in those days.

The idea was to build a solution that would meet not only the needs of the communication office, but also most of the university's demands regarding the publication of content on the internet.

UnB's web structure is absolutely fragmented. Not only with regard to the visual pattern, but also its logical layer. Hundreds of domains operating on different platforms, which are in different versions and with a managerial context only God knows how. If you put ten pages from ten different sectors of the university, you would see ten projects that are completely disconnected visually and technologically from one another. If one could find out that it was an integral part of the University of Brasília, it would already be a gain.

So we focused on a specific, well-delimited space with relatively low editorial complexity to develop the pilot project. Thus, the page UnB Ciência (www.unbciencia.unb.br) was reborn. It was in version 1.5 of Joomla and completely abandoned by the editors of the communication secretariat.

Focused on version 3 of Joomla, we developed a layout within the university's institutional standards regarding graphic design and navigability. Two or three plugins and components were also developed to meet editorial needs, such as displaying the profile and photo of the authors of the articles, for example.

Apart from the conception and effective design of the template, all the rest of the development was carried out by hiring external and punctual labor. The Secretariat of Information Technology did not offer support in this sector.

Following the launch of the page dedicated to scientific research at UnB, the model proposed by the Secretariat of Communication began to be replicated in several other sectors of the university. The institution's own home page was transferred from the old CakePhP from 2003 to a Joomla 3.X.

The need for upgrade and the storm

What was achieved in this period of almost ten years, given the potential already installed, would be a very complex analysis and the subject of several other articles. The fact is that, with the arrival of Joomla 4, the crisis was installed among the guardians of the digital version of the University of Brasilia.

The estimation made by SIT technicians is that there are around 600 sites on their servers, with Joomla in all possible versions, from series 1 to 3. Faced with the need to update the platform and based on technical analysis, which still I did not have access to, the direction of the secretariat decided to migrate the pages of the University of Brasília to another CMS.

Asked about the existence of a technical note that explained the context and the decision, the technicians said they did not know anything about it. They also claim not to have participated in the decision. The Secretariat of Communication also bypassed this process.

Lessons, anyone?

The initial idea of ​​this article was to verify the unfolding of Joomla at UnB, almost ten years after adopting the platform for its main pages, and share the experience with the user community around the world.

It turns out that the issue is much bigger than our beloved CMS itself. It's about governance, the long-term project, support staff and development teams, and a broad and almost limitless process of implementing and developing a culture. And if you’re a Joomler working for a larger organisation or institute, that is certainly something to keep in mind.