VoxDev.org: Migration from Drupal 7 and redevelopment

VoxDev is a global platform for economists, policymakers, practitioners and others interested in development to discuss key policy issues.

A highly technical implementation

For the new VoxDev website, our team delivered the following: 

• Mailchimp integration for sending email newsletters with newly published content
• CKEditor 5 installation and configuration (previously CKEditor 4)
• Content search, faceted search, combined search criteria features
• Existing functionality improvements (e.g. admin back office experience, tagging features etc.)

Key challenges and achievements

Unavailable modules

Some of the Drupal 7 modules were obsolete on Drupal 9. As a result, we had to recreate the same functionality with either different modules or some custom coding. Fortunately, Drupal 9 and 10 make it much easier to hook into contributed modules and produce bespoke plugins with custom code, making the task of recreating the existing functionality 100% viable. 

Recreating a Drupal 7 theme

An essential requirement for this project was to exactly recreate the front-end theme (UX, functionality, styling, AA WCAG accessibility rating) as a pixel-perfect, exact match on the new Drupal 9 application. The Senior front-end developers in our team made this possible with Bootstrap and Javascript-jQuery. 

We translated the main parts of the website into manageable categories and created tables of elements shared across the different sections. That enabled us to have a better and clearer view of the high-level requirements for the new theme and worked our way towards creating the basic structure for templating and theming on the new web application. That provided the basis for all the theming work required to recreate the Drupal 7 theme from scratch.

Conclusion

We truly enjoyed working on this project and delivering a beautiful, upgraded website to our valuable partner, Vox Dev