Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
As usual, we made several contributions to community modules while working on this project: from bug fixes, tips and new features (Drupal core, CKEditor Non-breaking space Plugin, JSON Web Token Authentication (JWT), Simple OAuth Revoke,…) to new contrib modules (Layout Paragraphs Split, CKEditor5 Formatting Marks).
Alternatives Économiques website was on Drupal 7, and has been online since 2016. Due to technical debt and security risks, Alternatives Économiques wanted to redesign its website.
There was also a desire to improve and facilitate the editorial team's workflow.
About the project
Goals
- Provide back-office tools that would empower the editorial team in their daily work
- Adopt a stable, secure and up-to-date web platform
- Make bug fixes and new feature additions easier
- Provide readers with a more modern website
Requirements
- Connect Drupal with other tools, notably the subscription management tool, the paywall, or the mobile app.
- Migrate existing content dating from before 2016, with some content not designed for web display
- Improve the content types and the Paragraphs module structure
Outcomes
- Improved user experience, thanks to modern features and better performance
- More focused back-office experience for the editorial team
- Continuous integration allowed deployment of new features or bug fixes with minimal downtime
- More stable web platform, with a reduction in the number of regressions on the website
Why Drupal was chosen
Initially, Alternatives Économiques ordered a comparative study of CMS solutions, with or without a headless architecture. WordPress was thoroughly studied as a potential alternative to Drupal. The agency in charge of the study said both could meet the needs, but still advised to use WordPress, which was slightly better rated according to their criteria — better suited for editorial content, and easier to use (notably with Gutenberg).
Nevertheless, Drupal was chosen, mainly for its flexibility. It was important for Alternatives Économiques to have an easy-to-use tool for readers and especially for the editorial team, and the extensibility of CKEditor 5 and Paragraphs played a significant role in the decision. Even though building the base system would have been cheaper with WordPress, it was expected that detailed, tailor-made customization to meet present and future needs would be cheaper in the long run with Drupal.
Other reasons in favor of Drupal were:
- autonomy for customization through free and open-source modules
- a skilled and reliable technical partner, very familiar with the technical stack, to limit costs and delays
- ability to structure content and its links precisely, for discoverability and searchability
- better separation between content and display, for cheaper redesigns later
- for SEO and UX, ability to serve large up-to-date pages quickly, even for authenticated users, even for fast-moving pages and even with high traffic
- better integration with Apache Solr for accurate text search in a huge volume of content
- a centralized source of contributed code (drupal.org) supervised by a dedicated security team
It should be noted that the former website being built on Drupal was not an argument in favor of Drupal, as it had no impact on the estimated content migration costs — a rebuild from scratch of the website architecture and content structure was needed. Still, the Drupal 11 Migrate ecosystem was seen as an advantage.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Typed Entity allowed us to separate business logic from technical Drupal implementation, which eases maintenance. For example, many content types share some features.
Auth modules were used as a foundation to build a seamless Single-Sign-On feature based on Qiota.
Most of the modules listed-above are self-explanatory, and some deserve more fame!
