Project Snapshot
The Platform
The MIT Alumni Association's digital platform at alum.mit.edu serves as the primary engagement hub for MIT's 148,000+ living alumni worldwide. It is one of the most prominent higher education Drupal installations in the world. MIT's Information Services and Technology group has long used Drupal as its CMS of choice, and the alumni site is a flagship implementation of that standard.
This is not a brochure site. The platform operates as a multi-faceted digital ecosystem combining public-facing content, authenticated alumni services, and integrations with multiple third-party platforms.
Public-Facing Content
- Slice of MIT — an award-winning daily blog covering alumni stories, campus life, and community news, with categorized verticals across Alumni Life, Campus Culture, Video, and Podcast
- Communities section — the global network of regional alumni clubs and interest-based groups
- Events calendar — full listing of in-person and virtual events, Tech Reunions, and 30+ annual MIT Alumni Travel trips
- Careers section — career fairs, recruiting events, career services, and professional development webinars
- Volunteer section — resources for 14,000+ active alumni volunteers who serve on boards, committees, and as class officers
Authenticated Services (Infinite Connection Portal)
- Online Alumni Directory (OAD) — searchable across location, employment, volunteer groups, student activities, and more
- Email for Life — @alum.mit.edu forwarding and Outlook 365 mailbox access
- My Account — profile management, contact preferences, and privacy controls
- Knowledge Base — centralized volunteer training hub with tutorials, templates, policies, and video resources
- Outreach Management Tool — fundraising and event outreach management for alumni volunteers
- Leadership Nominations Portal — board and committee nominations, volunteer honor roll, MIT Corporation submissions
Third-Party Integrations
- Hivebrite — MIT Alumni Online Community, digital home for 200+ volunteer-led clubs, classes, and groups
- Localist — events calendar powering the community event platform
- MIT Alumni Advisors Hub — one-to-one career consultations including informational interviews, resume critiques, and mock interviews
- MIT Alumni Job Board — job postings platform exclusively for alumni and postdocs
- MIT Atlas App — digital MIT ID for campus access, alumni lounge entry, and vendor discounts
- Outlook 365 — Email for Life mailbox infrastructure
The Engagement
WebEvra was brought in as a subcontracted Drupal maintenance team for a 16 week engagement through the second quarter of 2025. The brief was to provide senior Drupal capacity on a platform where the bar for stability, security, and editorial reliability is non-negotiable.
In an established institutional setup like this one, a maintenance engagement looks very different from a greenfield build. The rules of engagement are:
- Work inside the existing code review and deployment workflow, not around it
- No breaking changes to content models, routing, or integrations without explicit approval
- Every change is tested locally in DDEV, reviewed, deployed to the multidev environment on Pantheon, verified, and only then promoted to production
- Security patching is prioritized on the Drupal security team's release cadence
- Editorial team disruptions are minimized at all times
Scope of Work
Over the 16 weeks the scope covered the typical categories of senior Drupal maintenance on an enterprise site:
- Drupal core and contrib security updates — patching releases from the Drupal security team through the existing git and Pantheon deployment workflow
- Bug triage and fixes — frontend rendering issues, form submission edge cases, Twig template adjustments, and broken integration handshakes
- Performance tuning — caching configuration, query optimization on heavy Views-driven pages, and reducing page render time where metrics drifted
- Content type and field adjustments — small additive changes to support editorial workflow needs from the Slice of MIT and communications teams
- Integration debugging — resolving edge cases in the handshake between Drupal and third-party systems (Hivebrite, Localist, Outlook 365, and the Infinite Connection portal)
- Editorial support — responding to editor-reported issues on the Slice of MIT daily publishing flow and community event content
Technical Environment
- CMS: Drupal 10
- Hosting: Pantheon
- Deployment workflow: Git based, Pantheon multidev environments, promoted to production via pull request
- Local development: DDEV
- Authentication: MIT single sign-on infrastructure for the authenticated Infinite Connection portal
Why This Engagement Matters
Working on alum.mit.edu, even in a maintenance capacity, demonstrates capability at the highest tier of institutional Drupal. The platform serves an audience of 148,000+ alumni of one of the world's most prestigious universities, with essentially zero tolerance for downtime, security incidents, or broken functionality.
The site integrates with multiple enterprise platforms, manages authenticated user sessions for the Infinite Connection portal, and supports daily editorial operations for the award-winning Slice of MIT blog. Maintenance on a site of this scale requires deep Drupal architecture knowledge, familiarity with multi-system enterprise integrations, adherence to enterprise-grade security and release practices, and the discipline to work inside an established institutional development workflow.
Being trusted to touch a site like this is a meaningful signal of the kind of Drupal engineering WebEvra is hired to do.
Tech Stack
- CMS: Drupal 10
- Community platform: Hivebrite (200+ clubs, classes, groups)
- Events: Localist
- Email: Outlook 365 (Email for Life)
- Authentication: MIT single sign-on (Infinite Connection portal)
- Hosting: Pantheon
- Local development: DDEV
- Deployment: Git, Pantheon multidev
- Content: Slice of MIT blog, structured service pages, authenticated portal
Need senior Drupal capacity on an established platform?
The MIT Alumni Association engagement is a good example of where we are strongest: institutional Drupal sites that need senior capacity for bug triage, security patching, performance tuning, and integration work, inside an existing release workflow. If your team needs that kind of support on a Drupal 9, 10, or 11 site, book a strategy session. See also our Drupal support and maintenance service page.