Interactive blog for Unity Technologies

Who is Unity?

The Unity blog is an interactive, high traffic, content heavy blog with over 4000 blog posts. The Unity blog is a cornerstone of the Unity website. The blog was outdated from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint and Unity wanted to relaunch using Drupal.

What problems were Unity facing?

1xINTERNET was contracted to implement a headless version of the blog for Unity Technologies using Drupal as the backend, and React / Next.js as the frontend. The previous blog was implemented using Wordpress, unstructured data had to be migrated into a solid data model, to enable publishing as a headless application.

Unity needed to improve their content discoverability, increase content engagement and users' time present on the site. The goal was to build a blogging system that provided a good user experience with a state of the art editorial experience for the Unity team and to contributors of the blog.

How could we help Unity migrate to Drupal and upgrade blog? 

1xINTERNET worked with Unity to come up with a solid idea of what the target system should look like and opted for a decoupled Drupal /  Symfony backend with a frontend based on React / Next.js. Data was exposed with GraphQL to later allow for a federated GraphQL API. Styling was done with Tailwind CSS, and components were prepared in Storybook.

The migration from Wordpress to Drupal of such a high traffic website was a complex task but this enabled the unstructured data within Wordpress to be moved and transformed into highly structured data within Drupal. This structured data is a much more effective foundation for the development of the blog project. In the old Wordpress blog there was limited language support. This was migrated into the powerful Drupal multilingual system, which holds solutions for translations to multiple languages using different automated translation services.

The Unity blog is a cornerstone website for Unity. It is one of their most important web properties, providing a place for the community to discover, learn, and grow. It was essential to create a platform in which both users and editors experience great functionality whilst allowing scope for growth.  Unity chose headless over regular Drupal in order to support their long term strategic roadmap. The headless implementation is inherently decoupled, which calls for less dependency giving the ability to “create once publish everywhere”. The ability to reuse content across platforms allows  traffic to be driven around within the Unity websphere.

Main features of the project

• Migration from Wordpress to Drupal

A complex migration of a multilingual website with over 4000 blog posts, a high traffic site with 200k visitors per month. Unstructured Wordpress data was migrated into a highly structured data model in Drupal. Structured data was better for the management of content and to support the future growth of Unity.

• Support of meta tags, redirects, and media

Regular Drupal functionality was used to generate meta tags of different types as well as publishing structured data using JSON-LD. Standard functionality for redirects and media could be used by having Drupal as a headless backend.

• Optimal image editing using Drupal and Next.js

Images had to be dealt differently that the default Drupal way, therefore 1xINTERNET contributed to the Drupal project an image resizing plugin that returns images correctly to the Next.js frontend  with the expected properties in order to handle the styling in an efficient automated fashion.

• Editorial experience

1xINTERNET built an advanced state of the art editorial experience creating a workflow for the large editorial team, using the inbuilt functionality of Drupal. The Unity team also works with external editors who send content to be published. Before publishing on the blog, the authors need to review the content on the blog and approve it. 1xINTERNET created a module that grants access to unpublished pages using access tokens and extended GraphQL to support this functionality.

• Unity ID

Unity already had a login system meaning that anyone who engages with Unity through the forms, blog or commenting system gets a Unity ID. Once this was integrated for  the blog it allowed a seamless single sign-on experience for user interactions across the Unity services. This is a great improvement for a streamlined user experience.