Continuing our longstanding engagement, we were invited to redesign the UTS website and upgrade it from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
Context
Averaging 1.1 million page views a month, site performance needed to be a key consideration with the update of the UTS site. It was evident early on that this would be a comprehensive project, involving the migration of 22k nodes of published content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and the update of landing pages that were a static template design in the Drupal 7 version of the site to become flexible template designs in Drupal 8.
About the Client
The University of Technology Sydney is a public university of technology, with the purpose of advancing knowledge and learning through research-inspired teaching, research with impact and partnerships with industry, the professions and community.
THE SOLUTION
PreviousNext looked to improve site performance with the implementation of a new remote entity adapter framework. The new adapter framework maintains a key-value store for each entity-type serving as a local mirror for the content. When a page is loaded on the site, our Drupal 8 implementation first attempts to find it in the local mirror, reducing load on the web-service and improving the performance of the site.
The flexible templates were implemented using the paragraphs module combined with flexbox and style guide components to create a completely modular content management experience. The styleguide components developed for the site are platform-independent (not tied down to Drupal) and use modular js, sass and twig templates. The benefit of this approach is that UTS can use the styleguide components and implement them across their entire web presence.
THE RESULT
The project commenced in December 2016, and the new website was successfully launched in early September 2017.