Since 1928, the Wisconsin Union has been the heart of student life at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offering dining, events, recreation, and cultural experiences for students, alumni, and the public. Its website is the central hub for all of these offerings.
The Union partnered with Electric Citizen to rebuild its website on a modern, widely supported CMS — Drupal — ensuring easier content management, improved workflows, and a sustainable platform for future growth. The Union's in-house developer had already started the Drupal project but, facing a tight timeline alongside other duties, needed outside help to complete the planning and execute the build.
As a preferred vendor for the UW system with a track record of successful campus projects, EC joined the engagement to partner with the Union's developer and carry the project across the finish line.
About the project
Challenge
The Union's marketing director wanted to replace the existing Silverstripe CMS with Drupal, and the Union's in-house developer had begun the Drupal project on their own. But capacity was limited — the developer had only so much time available alongside other duties, and the team as a whole had limited experience with large-scale migrations or Drupal best practices. They needed an experienced higher ed partner who could step into an in-flight project, help finish the planning, execute the build, share best practices, and deliver a customized, functional site on a tight timeline.
Solutions
Electric Citizen brought three things to the engagement: process, migration expertise, and a collaborative build alongside the Union's own developer.
On process, we began by setting up a dedicated development environment, allowing our team and the Union's developer to work on code and configuration in parallel without affecting the live site. We used Git version control and a shared development server for smooth collaboration, quality assurance, and transparent progress throughout the build — and used the project as an opportunity to help "level up" the Union's team in Drupal best practices so they'd be ready to take over after launch.
On migration, rather than manually transferring hundreds of pages, media items, and user accounts from Silverstripe, we scripted an automated migration using Drupal's Migrate suite. That involved mapping existing content types, permissions, and media to their new Drupal counterparts, and testing and refining the migration until it was accurate. The final migration ran just before launch to capture the latest updates.
On development, we worked alongside the Union's in-house developer on a coordinated scope of work: rebuilding the existing site theme in Drupal to match the visual design of the current site; getting multiple event RSS feeds running and formatted correctly; configuring recurring events and calendars so dates, recurrence, and chronology all behave as expected; setting up Workbench Access and editorial workflows for a distributed editorial team; building an automated event importer that reads a CSV file to bulk-load events; and assisting with theming and QA of hours-of-operation displays on location pages. All features were tested for accessibility, performance, and browser compatibility before launch.
In the client's words:
"Working with EC saved a lot of time on a critical project, allowing us to complete the site much sooner than if I kept working on it alone." — Iva Goldsmith, Web Manager, Wisconsin Union
Outcomes
Electric Citizen completed its scope of work on time and on budget, handing the site back to the Union's team for the remaining manual migration tasks, QA, and launch preparation. When the Union was ready to launch, we ran a final automated migration of the content we controlled to capture the latest updates from Silverstripe.
The new Drupal site gives the Union's marketing and editorial staff a more intuitive, efficient platform for managing content — no custom coding required for everyday updates — and the improved workflows and training we provided empower the Union's team to manage the site internally going forward. The client was very happy with the result.
Why Drupal was chosen
The Union's marketing director had already identified Drupal as the right replacement for the existing Silverstripe site before EC was engaged. The decision point for this project wasn't Drupal vs. something else — it was how to execute the move. Drupal remained the right choice for several reasons:
- Widely supported open source platform — Moving off Silverstripe was driven in part by sustainability concerns. Drupal offers a large, active contributor community, a deep talent pool, and a long track record in higher education — directly addressing the Union's goal of a platform they could grow on for years to come.
- Editorial flexibility — The Union's marketing and editorial staff needed a CMS that let them manage content without custom coding for everyday updates. Drupal's component-based authoring model delivered that out of the box.
- Sector fit — Drupal is broadly adopted across U.S. higher education and student life organizations, which meant proven patterns for event calendars, program pages, and dining/retail content.
- Editorial workflows and roles — A student union site has multiple editorial stakeholders across dining, events, recreation, and program teams. Drupal's role-based permissions and workflow tools support a distributed editorial team well.
- Accessibility — As a public university facility serving a broad community, the site had to meet a high accessibility bar. Drupal's accessibility-focused core and admin experience support sustained WCAG compliance.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The heart of this project was a clean migration off Silverstripe onto a CMS the Union's team could grow with. The Migrate suite — including Migrate Plus and Migrate Tools — gave us the scaffolding to script an automated migration of users, event nodes, and blog nodes from Silverstripe, mapping content types, permissions, and media to their new Drupal equivalents and running a final sync just before launch to capture late-breaking content changes. We also used the Migrate framework to build an automated event importer that reads a CSV file on a recurring basis, giving the Union's team an easy way to bulk-load events without manual data entry. Pathauto and Redirect protected SEO equity and inbound links through the platform change — critical for a long-running site with years of accumulated inbound traffic.
Events are a core part of what the Union does, so date and calendar handling had to be rock solid. Smart Date provides robust date handling, recurrence, and chronology for the Union's event calendar and multiple event RSS feeds. Paragraphs, Layout Builder, and Media Library give editors flexible, component-based pages and centralized media management, while Workbench Access provides section-based editorial access control for a distributed editorial team spanning dining, events, recreation, and program areas. The Gin admin theme and the Bootstrap Barrio base theme round out the front- and back-of-house experience — Bootstrap Barrio as a proven Bootstrap-based theming foundation for the custom front end, and Gin for a cleaner, more accessible editing experience.
As a high-visibility student life site, the Union also needed strong discoverability. Metatag supports SEO at scale.
