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Migration and re-design of a D7 to D9 site with improvements to accessibility, stability and pdf generation.
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Technical Features
Problem
UTE was on Drupal 7 for many years and needed to move the site to Drupal 9. Site Administrators wanted to retain most of their theme design and style, while having a need for system wide messaging and improvements to discovery of important information.
A key user issue was the postitioning of the latest collective agreement and newest collective agreement information. The site had local specific pages and information that local members sometimes stuggled to find.
Their website needed to be compatible with modern browsers and mobile devices as it was an older site. Design should use the principles of responsive design including flexible grids, flexible images and media queries for desktops, tablets and phones.
They also had some custom modules that needed to be re-written/improved such as a phonebook module that printed update lists in pdf format.
Solution
We provided improvements to the theme, with clearer distinctions and use of colour and a modern, cleaner look. Our web team went through our typical design process by meeting with stakeholders and seeking approvals on style tile, new brand colours, components library, ui patterns and mockups/wireframes.
After our approval process, we built up our testing environments and began to write the required migrations. This site also had webforms to be reconstructed, tested to allow submission forms of staff activities.
We were able to capture nearly all of them migrations and re-implemented their custom modules, testing them one at a time back into the D9 testing environment. Because of this thorough work keeping the code updated and robust, we were able to launch the site on D9.4+ and will have an effortless time migrating to Drupal 10.
The main navigation menu was rebuilt with the use of an accessible menu. The entire menu is navigable with a keyboard and screen reader with support with aria controls and arrow keys as well.
We were able to update the alert system to provide more recent alerts. Greater control on messaging was provided.
We designed a proper search page that gave full access to the site content. Full support and enhancements were provided to their site search system with apache Solr indexing. We also provided performance and responsive mobile design improvements.
Results
The site launched at the end of Q1 2023, with a full working site. The site was revamped, the collective agreement action items readily discoverable and our solution to the “find your local” is visible in the image below. Visitors to the site can easily locate their local’s location by accessing the dropdown menus on main landing page.
