Drupal Lite sites provisioned after January 27th, 2026 move through distinct stages in a website lifecycle: site provisioning, development, launch, a live production phase, and often ultimately a decommissioning phase. This article walks you through the full lifecycle of your website. This example assumes that your site moves through all possible lifecycle stages, but please note that your website can be terminated at any time after your initial request submission if it is no longer needed.
Note: The lifecycle for Enterprise and hybrid sites is different than in Drupal Lite. For Enterprise/hybrid, see Drupal Enterprise: Managing Multiple Environments.
Phase I: Website Request
In order to create a new Drupal Lite site, you must complete the Drupal Request form. See Request a Drupal Lite Site for additional information and a link to the form. Many departments have established an approval workflow within their department. If applicable, your request will initially be routed to your departmental approvers for review. These approvers may reach out to you with questions or concerns about your request. Please note that departmental approval turnaround time is highly variable and outside of the control of the OIT Drupal team.
If your request is approved by your department, or if your department does not have an approval process established, it will proceed to the OIT Service Desk for processing. Please allow 5-7 business days for provisioning once the Service Desk receives your request.
If you have questions about the status of your request, please contact the OIT Service Desk with the service request number.
Phase II: Development
Once your requested Drupal Lite site has been provisioned by the OIT Service Desk, it will be handed over to you in the development phase. While in this phase, your website will not be indexed by search engines and is not intended to have visitors, beyond those you ask to preview your website to provide feedback.
During your website development, you can set up accounts for any additional editors, add your initial website content, set up your navigation menu structure, adjust your content layout, etc. Please review the Drupal Lite Self-Help Guide if you are developing a Drupal Lite website for the first time.
Dev URL
While in the development phase, your site will use a dev version of your website domain name. This URL will end in ".dev.umn.edu" rather than ".umn.edu." Please note that this will not be the final URL for your website once the website has launched for visitors.
Dev Admin Toolbar
While your site is being developed, editors will see "DEV ENVIRONMENT - This is not your live site" within the admin toolbar. Additionally, the admin toolbar is purple in dev but will be teal once your website is live.
Phase III: Website Launch
Once you are happy with the content of your website and are ready to advertise it to visitors, you must submit a request to move to the live production phase. Please refer to Drupal Lite: Launch Your Website for information on this step.
Phase IV: Live Website
Once the OIT Service Desk has launched your website, you may proceed to attract visitors. Assuming your website has public-facing content that is not behind UMN authentication, search engines such as Google will automatically crawl and index your site. Please note that this process does not happen immediately and is not controlled by OIT.
Once your website is live in production, you will no longer have access to the previous development environment and all changes you save will reflect for your website visitors within 1 minute. You and your collaborators can continue to edit your website directly in production whenever you need to make changes.
Production URL
Your website production url will end in "umn.edu" and will not include ".dev."
Production Admin Toolbar
Editors will see a teal admin toolbar in the production environment which reads "Drupal Lite 11."
Phase V: Decommissioning
While typically this phase comes after a website has been live for some time, it could come at any point whenever you determine that your website is no longer needed. As a steward of University resources, site owners are responsible for notifying the OIT Drupal team if any of their websites can be retired. This includes sites that are still under construction in the development phase and were never launched for visitors.
To initiate your website retirement, site owners must complete the Drupal Request Form.
- Click the Request Service button in the top right
- Under Select the type of service being requested, choose Request support for an existing site. Additional form fields will appear.
- Enter your website domain name in the What is your site URL? required field.
- Enter your development URL if your website has not launched.
- Select Decommission website as the work requested. An additional question appears.
- Choose the appropriate radio button to indicate if you would like a backup prior to your website deletion.
- If there are any special circumstances that the Drupal service team should know, please note these in the Additional Information text field.
- Click Submit.