Sector(s)
OISE, Canada's prestigious all-graduate institute of teaching, assigned us with developing their new website. One that should incorporate several key features missing from the one that they running at that time.
In this respect, our client expected their new OISE-dedicated website to:
- be fully responsive
- greet its student and professor visitors with a more user-friendly layout
- load its pages faster
- provide smooth navigation
In short, the Institute's new Drupal website was due to deliver the best user experience. One that would be greatly improved through:
- a better page loading speed
- a new user-friendly UI
- a more effective navigation structure
About the project
The overall goal was to create a new website for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
One that would check all the above-mentioned features and functionalities (user-friendly UI, high page loading speed, intuitive navigation...) off the requirements list.
A Drupal 8-based website where both future and current students could easily find the information they search for:
- specific types of graduate programs
- news, upcoming sessions, and presentations
- information on support services, leisure, and learning opportunities
- information on various certifications
In that sense, the classical Drupal data structure is kept, as it enables us to easily migrate/extend the current project with new functionalities at any time in the future.
Why Drupal was chosen
And why precisely Drupal 8?
- because it's fast, particularly Drupal 8, which comes packed with lots of performance improvements; and our client did expect a boost in their website's performance
- because it's conveniently flexible
- because its modular structure streamlined the whole development process and enabled us to implement into the new website precisely those capabilities that the client required
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Block field
Since we were dealing with a content-packed Drupal site, it was crucial to provide the best editing experience to its future content writers.
In this respect, this module enables them to easily add new custom blocks to existing nodes and paragraphs.
Paragraphs
The Paragraphs module empowers editors to better structure their content, replacing the old field group way for creating complex tree-form content architectures,
They can just scan through the pre-defined, standalone paragraphs types (that go from images to configurable slideshows, to text blocks) and select the right ones for specific pages on the website.
Twig Tweak
It “spoils” themers with tools that share the same useful functions and filters with Drupal entities on the Symfony twig template engine. A significant improvement to the Drupal developer's experience.
Tools that we used:
Bootstrap
Our front-end framework of choice, since it ships with lots of built-in JS and CSS components.
As Drupal developers, we were able to quickly spin up the new website, without investing too much valuable time in styling a specific element or addressing small design issues...
