Sector(s)

Team Members

allieorocks, cedewey, erinfogel, hanpersand, hbrokmeier, hipp2bsquare, sonfd

Project Team

  • Design by Theory One
    • Jon Geldert
    • Alicia Pritt
    • Jack Kornet
    • Cheryl Burke

Scripted migration and additional back-end development by Jean Tang.

Visit the site

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

We believe in building websites that can be used by everyone, so accessibility is a top priority of ours.

We contributed back to make several Drupal contributed modules more accessible, including

We also helped move forward Google Tag's Integration to Consent-Management.

DevCollaborative led a rebuild and redesign of Free Press’ website to modernize its codebase, expand its storytelling features, and refresh its design system.

While it was running on Drupal 10, much of its underlying architecture was built in non-standard ways. This made it onerous and costly to maintain and improve. Also, its design was several years old and showing its age.

DevCollab rebuilt the site using Drupal best practices and migrated its content into the new, cleanly-architected site. We leveraged Entity Embed for components such as charts, image galleries, and timelines. To increase petition and donation conversions, DevCollab integrated the site with ActionKit. Theory One designed a modern, effective theme which DevCollab implemented using modern CSS.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
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Clean, Modern Codebase Following Drupal Best Practices

Free Press came to DevCollab several years ago with a website that seemed fine at first glance.Looking under the hood, however, we found it was built with bespoke PHP code that took it off the Open Source Superhighway and made even simple tasks like Block placement and Views creation difficult and time-consuming.

We revamped their technical architecture and codebase to meet the needs of end users,  and staff editors. Building in line with Drupal standards, staying much closer to core, we also made the site easier for developers to maintain efficiently and affordably into the future.

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Flexible Yet Intuitive Editor Experience

The old Free Press site included many storytelling elements for editors, but they were opinionated and inflexible as to  when, where, and how they could be used. This made site editing tedious for staff content editors.

We expanded the components available to editors and built them using CKEditor, CKEditor Accordion, Charts, Entity Embed, Footnotes, and Paragraphs, so that Free Press’ communications team can seamlessly build out webpages as they see fit.

To further ease work for staff content editors, we built the editing experience to match their established workflow. The Free Press team drafts and approves content in Google Docs. To accommodate this, we built a Google Extension that allows content editors to export their content from Google Docs into clean HTML, including footnotes markup. This has dramatically reduced Free Press’ time in getting their content from internal approval to published on the web.

The components available to them include:

  • Accordions

  • Calls to Action

  • Embedded videos

  • Footnotes

  • Inline images

  • Interactive charts

  • Question and Answer sections

  • Read More elements

  • Statistics

  • Timelines

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ActionKit Integration for Increased Mobilization

Not since the Gilded Age has journalism in the United States been under  attack to the degree it is right now. Free Press mobilizes people to fight for equitable access to technology. , They  advocate for diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, transparency in big corporate media, and  for journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what’s actually happening in their communities.

With its Drupal-ActionKit integration, Free Press helps thousands of people email the FCC, sign open letters to the largest media tech companies, and lobby their elected officials.

Previously, the Free Press site’s integration with ActionKit was superficial, taking users off freepress.net, leaving visitors with a clumsy user experience.

Taking advantage of Drupal’s amenability to third-party APIs, DevCollab built a thorough integration with ActionKit that weaves forms into the main website and gives users a smooth experience, all within freepress.net.

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Why Drupal was chosen

Free Press inspires supporters to donate and take action, educates policy makers on how best to fight for  a free and independent press, and trains journalists to improve their media coverage. 

Free Press champions ethical, community-owned technology. This values alignment is one reason that Drupal, an open-source, public project,  is a great fit for Free Press’ websites.  Drupal is also a powerful, flexible match for Free Press’ needs, as it has clean data structures, is commonly  integrated with many third-party platforms, and offers robust storytelling features. 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: