A Complete Redesign and Upgrade to Drupal 8
In continuation of a longstanding engagement, PreviousNext were invited by the University of Technology, Sydney, to redesign their website and upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
Challenge
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.
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 styleguide 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 means that UTS can use the styleguide components and implement them across their entire web presence.
Outcome
The project commenced in December 2016 and the new website was successfully launched in early September 2017.