Drupal services for the CEB Website maintenance

The Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) website serves the needs of a wide audience, including the general public, journalists, academia, researchers, Member States and UN system colleagues. Public content includes reports, background material, statistics and publications. Some content remains hidden behind a password as it serves internal coordination and collaboration among UN system organizations in management and programme areas.

The CEB Secretariat recently reviewed its web CMS approach. Alternatives were evaluated and compared using standard performance criteria, prioritized in a manner appropriate to CEB Secretariat’s publishing needs. The outcome of this study resulted in the selection of Drupal (7), to replace the existing CMS, Plone (2.5). This decision considered current and future needs of the CEB website content management system (CMS), including the following:

• Demonstrated success of platform within the UN system: WFP's main website and UNDP's Teamworks collaboration platform (among others) run on Drupal;
• Sustainability of the platform, in particular the availability of expertise;
• Flexibility provided by platform, including an emphasis of configuration over development of new modules and the ease with which functional and presentational updates are made;
• Community support: from a large development community, which demonstrates momentum and direction, while providing a secondary source to ad-hoc support;
• Privacy and security, workflows for access control and a scalable security architecture;
• Proven usability of the platform from the standpoint of a user and technical administrator;
• The relative ease with which the CEB website's design may be upgraded and maintained.

We intend on awarding a contract for an initial period of three years, with the possibility of extending the duration of the contract up to a total of five years, at the sole discretion of the United Nations Office at Geneva.

The skill requirements according to the nature of the task at hand but will include one or more of the following:

• Thorough understanding of Drupal 7, technologies, processes and related features.
• Specific skills: web development (PHP programming, information architecture) as well as other IT skills.
• Proficiency in Drupal development and related IT: Javascript, HTML, W3C standards such as XHTML, XML, MySQL database and PHP scripting language.
• Expertise in all aspects of creating a Drupal application features, including installation, administration, module development, module configuration, theming, and custom development.
• Extensive knowledge of the Drupal architecture.
• Experience with Features, Views and Context modules and GIT.
• Good communication skills, particularly writing skills in English.
• Attention to detail and experience in developing documentation for new features