NewsLII News | February 4, 2026
Content Management System & Server Upgrades
In order for new content to reach its audience on the LII website and beyond, the LII engineering team works in the background to ensure that our Content Management System (CMS) remains secure, usable, and reliable.
This year, the engineering team completed the significant but extremely unglamorous project of bringing a major CMS upgrade to completion. This upgrade presented such a challenge that the need for it in units across campus merited mention as a University-wide technical debt problem by Cornell’s Chief Global Information Officer Dr. Curt Cole in his October Emerging Tech Dialogue presentation to University IT staff members. The timely execution of the upgrade, which came with an immovable January 5, 2025 deadline, without major disruption to the public was a major achievement for our team, especially DevOps engineer Eric Gullufsen and developer Vivek Kumar. Eric and Vivek gave a presentation at the annual Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) Conference in which they shared their lessons learned with law school technology specialists from across the country.
Eric was also primarily responsible for performing upgrades to all of LII’s servers in time to meet another immovable external deadline, this one at the end of May. This task required upgrades or alterations to LII software to ensure continuity of all of our services, much of which was addressed by Vivek. Both the Drupal upgrade and server upgrades came with copious amounts of checking, testing, fine-tuning, and then re-checking and testing some more. Nichole McCarthy and Valarie Kimber were especially helpful (and patient) in making sure that processes for editing content in our collections of original materials were either unchanged or that changes to procedures were properly documented so that student authorship on our website could continue without disruption.
