Frequently asked questions

See our Timeline page for the most up-to-date information. If you have an Open Berkeley site, you may choose to either rebuild your site in Berkeley Web Builder as an early adopter or wait for the Web Platform Services team to programmatically migrate your site. If you are a new customer without an existing Open Berkeley site, then you may request to be an early adopter.

Per the Timeline page, Open Berkeley website teams who do not wish to rebuild their sites on the Berkeley Web Builder platform will need to wait for programmatic site migrations. Programmatic migrations will begin later in 2026 following the beta and early adopter phases. More specific details will be shared as the timeline develops and approaches.

To prepare, we recommend reviewing and organizing your Open Berkeley site's content and structure. Think of this like moving offices: the process will be smoother if you declutter and organize your belongings before the movers arrive.

Recommended preparation tasks:

• Delete old content: Review your content dashboard and remove any outdated or unused pages.
• Purge old files: Delete unnecessary images and attachments from your files dashboard.
• General cleanup: Review your site's categories and menus to ensure they are current and organized.

Berkeley Web Builder will offer the same features and benefits as Open Berkeley with the following enhancements and improvements:

• Redesigned user dashboards
• Ability to use custom as well as templated layouts
• Streamlined content types
• Updated Berkeley Brand look and feel
• And more

See the Preview page for more information about the above list.

Open Berkeley, the original version of the platform, was built using Drupal 7. Berkeley Web Builder has been built using Drupal 10, a more recent version of Drupal with more robust capabilities, which has allowed us to introduce new and improved features to better serve the needs of our university community. See the About and Preview pages for more information. 

The Berkeley Web Builder platform supports the Berkeley Brand guidelines for design, and the Berkeley Brand is managed by the Office of Communications & Public Affairs. Please contact the Berkeley Brand team with any questions and/or feedback: brand@berkeley.edu.

Depending on the size and scope of the Open Berkeley site, rebuilding the site in Berkeley Web Builder may be faster and less complicated than waiting for programmatic migration.

Programmatic migration requires significant technical processes and will take additional time to accomplish in order to ensure that Open Berkeley sites (i.e., all content and files and structure) are correctly moved to the new Berkeley Web Builder platform without disruption. If you have an Open Berkeley site and are eager to move forward with Berkeley Web Builder, then rebuilding your site will likely take less time than migration.

In addition to the technical processes, migration will require some manual work from campus teams. We will ask teams to review their content before migration and perform tasks (e.g., remove unpublished pages, update page layouts, etc.), and teams may also need to do post-migration cleanup on their sites due to technical and design differences between the two platforms. If you are taking the time to review your Open Berkeley site content, then it may be easier and more efficient to rebuild your site in Berkeley Web Builder at the same time. 

The Web Platform Services team will reach out to your designated Site Manager when we are ready to migrate your site. In addition to the programmatic migration, the overall process will involve some manual work from the respective website team. The Web Platform Services team will communicate the recommended steps that the website team should take before and after as a part of the migration process.

The new Site Manager role will be the main contact for the people working on individual Berkeley Web Builder sites. The Site Manager will also be the only role that will be able to modify other users’ roles in Berkeley Web Builder.

For more information, see the Site Manager Role page.

Eventually, all Open Berkeley sites will need to be rebuilt or migrated to the Berkeley Web Builder platform. We will not be developing new features or enhancements for the older platform. 

The Web Platform Services team will continue to support your Open Berkeley site until it has been migrated to Berkeley Web Builder. Sites hosted on Pantheon (including all Open Berkeley sites) have Drupal 7 Extended Support (D7ES) until at least January 2027.

Hosting and monthly maintenance fees for a site on the new platform should be the same as for the current platform.

For customers who choose to wait for their sites to be migrated, Site Managers will need to work with our Web Platform Services team within a 3-month period during which Berkeley IT will fund the hosting expense for the additional site. For our existing Open Berkeley customers who choose to rebuild their site rather than have us do the migration, Berkeley IT will offer a similar 3-month period.

If a customer’s rebuild or migration review takes longer than three months, the additional in-progress site would start incurring hosting charges (currently $22/month at the Basic plan rate) from the 4th month onwards.

If this changes, we will communicate with our site owners/customers at the appropriate time.