Skip to main content
IT Unconference

We Launched Drupal 8 Websites! Questions?

Proposed by Aaron Cole and Allison Ho

Shared the newly launched Drupal 8 sites for https://summerinstitutes.stanford.edu/ & https://earth.stanford.edu/ and the process behind what it takes to get a new D8 site up and running in one year or less.
Notes

  • https://summerinstitutes.stanford.edu/

    • Initial Pain points: Initial content authors were not able to login. All content edits had to go through one person

    • Video uploading was difficult but now you can use Youtube URL

    • “Paragraphs” help with controlled output of text and design

      • Very few WYSIWYG editors to allow for easier control of how text is displayed and used on a page

         

  • https://earth.stanford.edu/

    • Started with discovery project to identify:

      • Need to feature beautiful video and photography

      • what makes us different

      • business goals

      • user goals

         

  • Both sites launched with an  “mvp” launchable version

    • Agile development: launch with MVP - bare minimum that is acceptable

    • Backlog of ideas of what to integrate

    • SSO/SAML for D8 is still being built

    • Handling user accounts through local Drupal logins for now

    • some pages are still linking to their old sites

  • For redirects from the new site to the old site for content they haven't yet moved over

    • Used htaccess and pangea

 

  • Main site vs department sites:

    • Subsite feature - smoke and mirrors solution in order to implement a separate site within the same site but led to user confusion of where they were navigating to between multiple sites

    • Iterating to allow for global navigation and side navigation

  • Hosting

    • Earth is hosting on Acquia

      • Great for multi site environments

    • Depends on cost and budget

    • Cost for performance and stability

    • Also considered Pantheon - would recommend for single site; big reason

    • Summer Institutes is on Pantheon

      • UI is easy

      • As a non-technical person, it is very intuitive to use

  • Content Strategy & Design - and working with 3rd party agencies

    • For Earth: Starting with D8 we needed more resources to help with strategy and design. We reached out to Web Services (SWS) to help define the project and go through the process for finding an agency that could deliver on those requirements

      • Combination of outside agency for strategy and design while SWS developed the site

      • Earth picked Exygy agency

      • Keep in mind, design is expensive yet valuable “the minute you start talking to a designer, dollar bills are raining”

      • Budget: ballpark easily $200k+ - but don’t know the actual number due to a lot of the changes and project phases

    • For Stanford pre-collegiate studies

      • Committee of 10 people put together an RFP to find an agency

      • D7 to D8 question became a huge part of the discussion during the agency bidding process

      • Went with FFW agency

        • They had designed previous platform which was a terrible experience; they pitched hard to prove t

      • Entire process from Dec-April to pick a vendor; started working on project in June; launching in November (first launch)

      • Budget $230k over 2 fiscal years: 1200 hours so far with 800+ hours left in contract; as a self-funded department

    • 1 year at least for entire project timeline (and that’s optimistic)

      • Need skills for working with a vendor and agency to keep things moving on time and in scope/budget

    • From discovery came content strategy- then we were able to explain our choices to stakeholders

      • Able to communicate to stakeholders and other  feedback or opinion as to why decisions/choices were made

      • Discovery is so important as it helped build buy-in and excitement from the entire department

      • Scope of contract changed based on what they learned in discovery

    • Define stakeholders early on in the project

      • Complex committee and subcommittees layers involved along the project

      • Major stakeholder is leaving or changing - keep in mind their input and feedback can be huge

    • 75% of content had to be re-written to fulfill the needs of the new designs and content strategy

  • Drupal paragraphs

    • Component based authoring

    • Instead of giving an author a “WYSIWYG” to add any content and edit formatting endlessly, components allow users to select “I want to add a quote or a testimonial or X piece of content” Drupal will provide fields for a user to fill out and the output of the design is fixed based on the designs implemented

    • 18 paragraph components  - each paragraph has variations which creates infinite possibility per component and layout possibilities

    • Certain components are used for specific content needs

      • Eg. icon text used for more than intro text

      • Page follow component: identify areas of next pages/steps for a user to follow

  • Migration

    • Lot of it was copy/pasted from old site to new site

  • Anyone interested in meetups?

    • Next session topic for Drupal COP in January can be for D8