Hi Andrew
This is a great document.
One thought: at Tate (where I am still technically employed for another week although on holiday so mostly walking my dog around the Hampshire downs) we endeavoured to keep our technical estate as small as possible, for obvious reasons.
This becomes tricky when there are tight deadlines or projects which are bested packaged up and given to a supplier with the appropriate skills.
We were frequently finding ourselves with many legacy CMSs and associated databases (Wordpress, Drupal, home-brew, etc.) which we were having to keep going for years and years.
In the end we adopted a policy where these sites would be "mothballed" at some point. This involved flattening the site to html and removing the database and CMS.
It's a bit fiddly sometimes but basically we used SiteSucker http://www.sitesucker.us/mac/mac.html or HTTrack http://www.httrack.com to do this. (Pro tips: turn off obeying the robots.txt and expect to do some cleaning up with some find-and-replace across sometimes thousands of html files).
Often this means losing some functionality (e.g. search, commenting, etc.) but the site is kept alive and in most cases these features were not being used much anyway as projects were over.
The site would then be moved to a basic Apache server and the old URLs redirected.
Thus no one in-house has to manage the database or php version or patch a janky old version of Wordpress, nor do we keep need to paying suppliers to maintain old sites.
Examples: This was a Drupal site once http://www2.tate.org.uk/aiweiwei/ and this was a Wordpress site once http://www2.tate.org.uk/wondermind/
Now when we commission microsite (which we try to avoid but it in inevitable there will be a few) we ask that the technology used means that we can "mothball" the site later and we agree with the stakeholders when this will be upfront.
John
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