Sector(s)
Team Members
The Universidad El Bosque is a private university placed in Bogotá, Colombia, founded in 1987.
The University is well known as a multi-disciplinary institution with emphasis in the human development giving the best academic background in investigation and knowledge transfer with focus in Health Care and related faculties in the wellness areas. The University thinks global and is committed to the national and regional educational needs.
Background:
The portal of the University was built on Drupal 6 and had a 10 years old service. Even though it was still fulfilling some of the needs of the academic community, it was lacking most of the tools of the current Internet; it was not responsive to mobile devices, its design was old school and the browsing was not fit for a 2017 university website . The IT and marketing departments of the University were also interested in improving load speed, SEO and versatility in terms of content management.
About the project
The objective of the University by undertaking the development of a brand new portal was to turn on the sense of belonging and involvement of the academic community, consolidating the portal as a common digital asset that allows them to share and promote their academic activities . This portal is an important part of the Digital Ecosystem of the University, that has several platforms and web applications.
SeeD helped the University to architecture and achieve the following:
- We help them choose Drupal 8 by bringing to the table all the technical information needed by the IT crew in order to make up their minds.
- We proposed the infrastructure characteristics in terms of size and capacity to host the new portal in safe and good performing conditions.
- We developed and themed the new portal using the IA, UX and design parameters given by the digital team of the University.
- We kept record of the whole process on Drupal 8, including user roles, CMS users and technical manuals for future developments.
- We identified and integrated several third party services and created some required web services.
- We custom made a plan to train technical and content users on the new Drupal 8 paradigm.
- We implemented a multi-site so that the University can enable this feature amongst their content publishers.
Results:
The University now has a brand new website totally made on Drupal 8, fully administrable that guarantees the security of the information and the stability of the platform. This portal is better than the previous one in terms of performance, availability of information, user experience, system performance and SEO capabilities.
The phase 1 sections are:
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal 6 was a well worn path within the University and had been successfully implemented and utilized for many years. This good experience along with the new features offered by Drupal 8, such as the lifecycle relation,security , stability and support - offered by the development team - gave the necessary confidence to the Digital team in order to continue having Drupal as their digital flavor.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Context: It allowed us to condition the positioning of blocks according to the url.
- Group: It allowed us to create arbitrary collections of content and users on the site and access to grant control permissions on those collections.
- Paragraphs: It allowed us to create fields within fields.
- Display Suite: It allowed us to modify the HTML and CSS of nodes and blocks.
