Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Kanopi Studios
PBL Works
A Drupal 8 website to support teachers and help children succeed.
PBL Works provides training and resources to help teachers facilitate project-based learning, an alternative method that uses real-world scenarios or questions as a basis for long-term projects. Project-based learning helps children learn in practical ways and transforms their educational experience, resulting in greater engagement and success.
The organization (formerly the Buck Institute for Education) went through a rebrand to sharpen its focus on project-based learning, which presented an opportunity to rethink their website experience. In addition, their old site was dated, with multiple navigation styles and a static interface that made it difficult for authors to add or update content.
About the project
PBL Works partnered with Kanopi Studios with goals to build a beautiful, flexible new website that shared success stories, answered common questions, and provided educators with the necessary resources to offer quality, project-based learning for their students.
Kanopi Studios lead strategic work for the project, holding discovery sessions with stakeholders and creating a sitemap and wireframes to establish a solid foundation for design. The PBL Works team collaborated with Kanopi through the design phase, leveraging Pattern Lab to create a consistent and highly customizable design system that communicates an educational focus.
The Kanopi team leveraged Drupal’s paragraphs and component libraries modules to integrate the Pattern Lab design system, and added Salesforce integrations to help PBL Works track leads. The site also includes faceted search to help users to find content with ease.
The project firmly establishes the new PBL Works brand and provides a rich collection of resources to promote project-based learning and transform education for children.
Why Drupal was chosen
PBL Works was looking for an enterprise-level, open-source content management system. The new site was built on Drupal 8, ensuring flexibility and ease of use for the PBL Works team, who can now add and update content within a simple, drag-and-drop experience and make use of highly-customizable layouts.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- The Material Admin theme was chosen based on client design preferences
- ZURB Foundation 6 theme was used as a base for the custom front end theme
- Paragraphs and Component Libraries allowed for integration between Drupal and an external Pattern Lab
- Webform module supported Salesforce and Salesforce Web-to-Lead integrations
- Search API, Database Search, and Facets module supported simple, faceted search
