Workers' Educational Association (WEA): Drupal 8 on a Microsoft environment

With Drupal standing as a firm first-choice of CMS for the aforementioned reasons, Panlogic were keen to make use of Drupal 8 to anticipate increasing commitment amongst the developer community to the new version and to take advantage of the security, stability and accessibility benefits.

Goals
WEA sought to consolidate their various regional offices’ websites in a single, easy-to-navigate presence with considered user experience maintaining brand consistency. Key to success was a system that could facilitate the coordination of a federalised organisational structure with each region containing its own content editors, processes, content and audience. These regional profiles needed a consistent theme reinforcing WEA’s brand, reflecting the organisation’s vision and values and maintaining a common quality standard whilst accommodating differing regional needs.

Panlogic’s ‘definition of done’ for the project deliverables included high standards of accessibility, having provided modern website applications to strict AA standards for other clients including the Royal National Institute of Blind People. An equally rigorous approach was taken for mobile/tablet responsiveness and good adherence kept to Drupal coding standards as appropriate.

Responding to user needs and harnessing Drupal’s capabilities
Thorough user research exercises assisted in successful construction of an intuitive experience for users. A custom theme was developed for the website using SASS technology and HTML5 with information architecture structured to respond directly to evidence surfacing from Panlogic’s user research report.

Drupal’s flexible permission system was taken on enthusiastically by WEA’s content editors, particularly when enhanced with Content Access module to set permissions on a page-by-page basis. Content editors were easily able to manage their respective areas of the website and control which members of their audience particular content was directed towards. Content was tagged using taxonomy lists so that the Content view could easily be filtered by editors to display only relevant content. A combination of modules were used to provide a well-organised media library with easy access to embedding and modifying images within pages.

Apache Solr was employed to power the website’s search functionality including harnessing of Solr’s geospatial search feature to deliver interactive maps useful for WEA’s regional structure and localised offices and participating locations. Promotional sections of the website were delivered using Drupal Views to neatly organise categorised promotional content. Performance for end users was optimised using Wincache and Supercache modules.

Project process and management approach
Development was carried out over a 6-week period. Whilst Panlogic normally opt for a scrum-based management methodology, a more traditional plan was requested in this case. The Panlogic development team continued to log project information using Slack and manage prioritisation of tasks in a Kanban-fashion using Trello.

Challenges around using Drupal 8 with Windows
Whilst the brochure and promotional aspects of the website were structured using ordinary Drupal features such as ECK Entity bundles, Views etc., a more unique challenged was posed by the use of Drupal 8 with a Windows and Microsoft SQL stack. A clean install of Drupal 8 on the platform was fraught with database errors and was unusable with MSSQL. During the course of the project Panlogic submitted numerous contributions to Core and Contrib modules to integrate better with MSSQL.