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Community contributions
Manifesto’s commitment to contribution and a fix-it-upstream methodology dovetailed neatly with the University of Dundee’s desire to be an active actor within the Drupal community.
Following a review of the university’s Drupal.org profile, the combined team first attended a Contribution Day organised by Drupal Scotland, and then Drupal Scotland Camp 2019 Contribution Day, as well as the main conference, where both University of Dundee and Manifesto presented the sessions ‘Starting from Scratch with Drupal 8’ and ‘University of Dundee: Courses Case Study’.
The main contributions to core and contrib modules were related to Content, Revision and Moderation for custom entities.
Some highlights of the main issues:
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Helping with shipping Drupal 8 version of Search API Spellcheck module
And, until there is a nice solution in core, Taxonomy Revision UI contrib module (currently in sandbox) will provide revision management tabs for your revisionable Taxonomy terms.
Finally, during development the team experimented a lot with the new API to perform entity variant negotiation and, although we eventually opted for something different, we played with parallel revisioning support for adding custom variants to content items.
The University of Dundee, Scotland, is one of the UK's leading universities, internationally recognised for its expertise across a range of disciplines including science, medicine, engineering and art. Manifesto partnered with the University of Dundee to build a complex, robust web platform to serve the needs of the institution’s many audiences.
Working as an extension of the internal team throughout the discovery, build and delivery phases of the project, the agency used a raft of technologies, including Drupal 8, to help build capability and confidence in iterative ways of working and digital best practice, and accelerate the university’s digital transformation.
About the project
After selecting Drupal and Acquia’s platform for building their new website, the University of Dundee needed both technical expertise and guidance throughout the delivery project, and help with translating their initial research - gathered from over 100 stakeholders from across the organisation - into a high-level backlog and delivery plan. As well as delivering a new site to meet the needs of their various audiences, they also wanted to drive cultural change through the project, building internal digital capability and confidence.
In collaboration with the University of Dundee, through a range of on-site and remote workshops, Manifesto carried out an intense immersion period to unpick the university’s initial research, analysing the entire scope and then creating an initial epic-level product backlog. This would then act as the backbone for the project.
The backlog of features was substantial, and with a deadline of July 2019 for the first release of features, the project team agreed on what a successful first release would look like. This was achieved through a series of prioritisation and refinement workshops to break the features down into an MVP launch phase for July 2019 and subsequent releases leading through to the shutdown of the current platform in December 2020. The prioritisation and planning were based on what would deliver the most value to both end users and internal stakeholders.
With the epics identified, there was still work to do to understand further the scope and scale of each, so that they could be broken down into features ready to be refined, estimated and developed. One of the key outputs of this first phase was an initial 6-month plan through to July 2019 which outlined a set of solution design sprints running in parallel with the development sprints. The focus of each solution design sprint was to define a set of principles around the selected epic, pass this over to design, and then test the designs with users. These epics were then broken down into features ready for the development sprints.
Despite a wealth of skills in the University of Dundee team, covering UX research, design, development and content, they were struggling to achieve a cohesive and professionalised approach to digital delivery. Manifesto carefully balanced upskilling the team with ensuring that a working platform was delivered for the July 2019 deadline, providing technical leadership alongside agile coaching and product ownership consultancy to continue refining the roadmap and delivery plan. With the first release, focusing on undergraduate course pages, now under their belt, the team continues to grow in confidence as it focuses on delivering new features and areas of the site iteratively over the coming months.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal is used by some of the biggest and most complex sites in the world, including 71 of the top 100 universities in the world. It has one of the largest open source communities in the world, with over 1 million passionate developers, designers, trainers and strategists using it and working together on common problems. It gives the University of Dundee a hugely powerful platform on which to innovate and deliver incredible experiences that not only bring people to Dundee, but also takes Dundee to the world.
Improving development workflow
Drupal’s open-source codebase and well-established coding standards facilitated an agile approach to software development. A combined, distributed team would be able to make use of the platform’s various collaboration tools and protocols to create efficient workflows within a well-governed continuous deployment model.
Decoupled approach
The option of using Drupal 8 in a decoupled configuration would allow the team to use Atomic Design principles on the website’s frontend to better align with the university’s pattern library. The UI Patterns module, and its extensive documentation, would greatly benefit best practice development and advanced usage.
Secure, resilient architecture
The Acquia Cloud platform provides a fast, secure and resilient architecture that would allow Dundee to deliver fast and high-quality experiences, powered by Drupal 8, to users around the globe.
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Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Paragraphs: used to describe components to define the content of the page. The website pages are not the standard monolithic content coming from an overcomplicated WYSIWYG, but a series of flexible and engaging widgets including but not limited to Text, Media, Call To Action, Quote, Lists. Markup for components is provided by the University of Dundee Pattern Library, hosted in Gitlab and merged with the codebase through UI Patterns Pattern Lab and some custom gulp tasks.
Search API / Facets: search is crucial to the success of the website, combining a powerful content index together with an intuitive search interface. The index itself covers website content as well as courses (with all their unique metadata), a people directory, schools and other groups within the university.
Moderation Sidebar: although this is a small, straight-forward module, it’s a good example of facilitating an efficient editorial workflow as well as an easy editor UI and UX. However, Moderation Sidebar currently only supports nodes. As part of the build, we contributed to the module code to bring support to Taxonomy terms initially and, eventually, any entity (currently in need of review).
