Migrating a University to Drupal and Beyond

tyler.frankenstein
zengenuity

By utilizing Drupal 7, the University of Michigan Dearborn built its website from the ground up and then migrated in legacy TYPO3 content. Moving forward though, the University wanted to provide a compelling author experience for faculty and staff to maintain the website.

Providing authors with just a WYSIWYG or RTE will lead to content being generated of all shapes and sizes. This ultimately leads to a non-uniform UX, non-responsive content and accessibility issues. To combat this typical page authoring experience, one must:

  • Ditch the Body field
  • Provide easy to use tools for the creation of responsive pages
  • Have a workflow for pages from draft through publication
  • Easily add widgets to publish a wide range of content and media
    • Copy (with optional Image)
    • Topic Tiles & Accordions
    • Call to Action, Callout Quotes, Links
    • Image, Video, Events & News Carousels
    • Emergency Tickers
    • Maps, Social Media
  • Maintain revisions of all pages and widgets

Using a combination of Content Types and Entity Reference Fields authors are able to easily build beautiful, responsive, and accessible pages without being stuck in a Body field (think of the Paragraphs module, but with Nodes, Content Types and Revisions).

Why come to this session?

  • see how the site was built
  • hear what we learned along the way
  • what we expect for the future
  • and why we didn't choose Drupal 8 (yet)

Attendees should have in interest in Drupal 7 (or 8) and utilizing it for higher education purposes. After the session you'll walk away with the concepts and tools needed to build an entire University's website in Drupal 7.

Register NOW

Session Track

Site Building

Experience Level

Beginner

Drupal Version