New student union website at university

The Union's marketing director had decided to replace their existing CMS with Drupal, and their in-house developer had begun the project. But capacity was limited. The developer had only so much time available alongside other duties, and the team as a whole had limited experience with large-scale migrations. The project needed more hands and more Drupal-specific expertise to finish on time.

The Union needed an experienced partner in higher ed who could step into an in-flight project, help complete the planning, execute the build, share best practices, and deliver a customized, functional site on a tight timeline.

Establishing Development Operations (DevOps)

One of the more important things we bring to the table in every client project is our process.

We began by setting up a dedicated development environment, allowing our team (and the Union’s developer) to work on code and configuration in parallel without affecting the live site. Using Git version control and a shared development server, we ensured smooth collaboration, quality assurance, and transparent progress throughout the build.

Through sharing best practices and our process, we are able to help “level up” client teams who wish to contribute to the project, and those who wish to take over managing the site once our work is done.

Content Migration

Moving a website from one CMS to another is no simple task. But neither is the prospect of manually cutting and pasting hundreds of pages, images and documents from one site to the next.

Rather than manually transferring hundreds of pages, media items, and user accounts, we scripted an automated migration from the old CMS. This involved mapping existing content types, permissions, and media to their new Drupal counterparts, testing and refining the migration until it was accurate.

The final migration ran just before launch to capture the latest updates.

Custom Web Development

After establishing our DevOps and beginning the migration process, the next step was to assist the Union with a list of development tasks, coordinating work between our team and the Union’s own internal web developer.

Working alongside the Union's developer, we rebuilt the existing site theme in Drupal to match the current visual design, implemented multiple event RSS feeds, configured recurring events and calendars, set up editorial workflows with section-based access control, and built an automated importer that loads events from a CSV file. All features were tested for accessibility, performance, and browser compatibility before launch.

Our work was completed fairly quickly, with plenty of time for the client to review content and tools, and become familiar with the new CMS prior to launch.