HSG MBA Website Relaunch

The serialization issue in the GraphQL module is small, but has been around since March 2022 without a solution. Even if the patch is small, finding a fix is considered a big win because it reduces problems in many projects. On Amazee Labs' side, Alexander Tkachev worked on this patch.

The Master in Business Administration (MBA) Program at the University of St.Gallen (HSG) offers young professionals aspiring to pursue a career in the DACH region an internationally recognized postgraduate degree. The program’s website is primarily used to present the HSG MBA offerings to prospective students.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)

The HSG MBA program website needed a comprehensive relaunch to better meet the needs of the diverse target groups through improved navigation and presentation of the existing content. To create a contemporary user experience and to improve user guidance, existing components of the frontend were updated to fit into the new design, and some brand-new features were developed.

Key Features

Site setup with the GraphQL module

As part of the solution, the proposal was to relaunch the frontend on the basis of ReactJS and Gatsby and to decouple it from the backend. The new setup is a future-proof foundation for HSG MBA’s web presence and offers high performance, security, scalability and a smooth user experience across the site. This was achieved by installing and configuring the GraphQL module, which provides a way to craft and expose a GraphQL schema for Drupal 9 and 10. The module can also be used as a foundation for building its own schema through different plugins that are available and with custom code.

The headless Drupal configuration proved to be exceptionally effective for the system, the developer workflow has been enhanced significantly by the internal segregation. Furthermore, through the decoupled architecture greater overall reliability is ensured, by making the frontends more resilient. On top of that, a renewal of the technical infrastructure has ensured that the mba.unisg.ch performance has improved.

Mock-up on a laptop showing GraphQL details

Why Drupal was chosen

The website has been running as a Drupal website and was recently redesigned and relaunched in a decoupled architecture. The Drupal backend - including its contents - was to be retained to save the editorial team from having to recreate the website’s contents. As a result, the relaunch could be implemented with minimal editorial change for the first release. Next to implementing some new paragraph types, retaining existing paragraph types wherever possible proved to be a huge benefit for the editorial team: changes to the backend were kept to a minimum even if the frontend output underwent major changes. Hence, editors benefit from working with well-known elements.

Drupal 10 also provides a straightforward upgrade path, which ties in with HSG’s goal to have a durable, reliable and performant future-proof platform.