Notre Dame College of Engineering

How the College of Engineering easily manages dozens of departmental Plone sites

The Notre Dame College of Engineering had a problem when it came to websites: each department and center was going off and doing their own thing. The College wanted a consistent look to all the sites and a consistent way to manage them. They wanted staff to be able to easily share content between the sites, allowing them to promote content and the faculty involved.

They solved this problem with Plone, using the Lineage add-on to enable easy creation of subsites for each department and group. The subsites are built on a single Plone infrastructure, making it easy for IT to manage hundreds of sites. Yet each site can have the theme tweaked to provide a consistent yet individualized identity. By having content shared between sites, rather than copied and pasted, the College was able to manage the canonical source of content and increase their SEO.