drupal

1. Project Background & Overview

For nearly a decade, the Homeless Hub team from York University operated its homelesshub.ca platform, the leading resource for homelessness research and studies website on Drupal 7. However, with evolving needs, the platform became less suitable. The primary issues were a slow-loading website, lack of design flexibility, and an outdated search system, as well as a heavy backend system.

The Homeless Hub wanted a more intuitive and flexible platform that could provide a simplified backend for editors, options to create pages and sections independently, improved SEO and advanced search, plus a new, modern design to match their branding, as homelesshub.ca is their flagship site. The goal was to migrate from Drupal to WordPress while addressing these challenges.

2. Challenges Faced

Migrating such a large-scale website, with over 30,000 resources and more than 10,000 contributor profiles, posed several challenges:

• Complex Content Types: The site hosted diverse resources such as books, reports, toolkits, factsheets, journals and more, all with connected taxonomies and custom fields.
• Taxonomy and Custom Field Remapping: The existing taxonomies and custom fields required reorganization to improve efficiency and ease of use for editors.
• Search Functionality: An advanced custom search was needed to handle the volume of resources while offering granular filtering options. The old search engine was slow and not pulling relevant results.
• Design Precision: A pixel-perfect design had to be implemented, ensuring a modern, user-friendly interface and interaction.
• URL Structure and SEO: Some URL structures needed to be maintained, while others had to be improved, requiring careful redirection to ensure no loss of traffic. SEO improvements were also essential.

3. Solution & Execution

Our approach to the migration was carefully planned to ensure seamless execution:

• Migration Process: We used a combination of third-party plugins and custom scripts to migrate all resources, contributor profiles, databases, and large amount of files from Drupal to WordPress.
• Taxonomy Remapping: Custom-coded taxonomies were created to match the new improved structure and existing and new fields added using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). We combined and remapped taxonomies during the import process, reducing the number of fields and simplifying the backend for editors.
• Custom Search with Algolia: To address the need for advanced search, we integrated Algolia, creating a granular index with custom filters based on taxonomies and fields. This was seamlessly integrated into WordPress using a custom plugin to ensure fast and accurate search results.
• Design Implementation: We developed a design system in collaboration with the Homeless Hub team. Using the Divi theme, we redesigned the entire site, ensuring a modern, user-friendly interface. Rigorous testing was done across platforms (Mac, Windows) and devices (desktop, mobile) to ensure pixel-perfect design consistency.
• URL and SEO Enhancements: Resource URLs were kept intact, while new URLs were created for blogs and taxonomies. We implemented Yoast for SEO improvements and made careful redirections to ensure SEO optimization and traffic retention.
• Custom Plugins: We developed several custom plugins, including ones for fields ordering and taxonomy hierarchy management, and another for managing books with chapters and sub-chapters.

4. Unique Highlights

Several custom solutions added exceptional value to the project:

• Custom Plugins: We created custom plugins for managing content types like books with chapters and sub-chapters, as well as for taxonomy hierarchy and field ordering.
• Search Optimization: The granular Algolia search configuration resulted in an extremely fast and accurate search experience, greatly improving user engagement with the site.
• Successful Redirects: We ensured that all necessary URL redirects were in place, maintaining SEO rankings and avoiding any broken links.
• SEO Performance: Compared to the metrics before migration, the website traffic has drastically improved and the Google indexing as been extremely fast. According to GA, clicks and impressions spiked in number of days.

5. Results & Impact

The website migration resulted in significant improvements:

• Smoother Performance: The new site runs much more efficiently, with faster load times and enhanced usability.
• Simplified Backend: The backend is now intuitive, allowing editors to easily create and edit content, as well as create custom pages independently.
• Search Efficiency: Integrating Algolia greatly enhanced the search experience. The new search is now faster, more accurate, and provides users with real-time results from the vast 30,000-resource library. Users can easily filter results by various criteria, making it far easier to find relevant information quickly. This upgrade has improved accessibility and usability for researchers, policymakers, and the public.
• SEO Boost: By utilizing Yoast SEO, the website saw a significant rise in organic traffic and search rankings. Optimized content, proper URL redirects, and better site structure all contributed to this improvement. The site’s faster loading times have also positively impacted user retention, as visitors are more likely to stay and engage with the content.
• Enhanced User Experience (UX): The site is now faster, mobile-friendly, and easier to navigate. The updated design ensures a seamless experience across devices, while the simplified backend allows the Homeless Hub team to manage content more efficiently. The new platform provides a smoother, more responsive browsing experience, supporting the organization’s mission of making homelessness research more accessible.

Homeless Hub WP Website Launch

6. Conclusion

The Homeless Hub website migration from Drupal 7 to WordPress was a resounding success, achieving all of the client’s key objectives. The transition to a more flexible, user-friendly platform has empowered the Homeless Hub team to independently manage and update their site, while users enjoy a smoother, faster experience with enhanced search functionality. The project highlights the importance of meticulous planning, custom solutions, and collaboration to overcome the challenges of large-scale website migration.

With an improved design, better performance, and significantly increased traffic thanks to enhanced SEO, the new Homeless Hub website is well-positioned to continue providing vital resources and information for years to come. This project demonstrates the transformative power of a well-executed migration, where technology, design, and functionality come together to create a more efficient and user-focused platform.

We’re proud to announce the launch of our latest project, The Institute of Global Homeless Hub (IGHhub) website. Backed by The Institute of Global Homeless, the Hub is designed as a multi-purpose platform to serve researchers, practitioners, and policymakers across the globe and it addresses world-wide audience. It helps connect ideas, effective practice, policies, data and more in an admirable effort to eradicate street homelessness at a global level.

The platform is powered by the powerful Drupal content management system, it incorporates the latest tech features for advanced flexibility and usability and uses a custom, responsive design which renders perfectly on laptops, desktops and mobile devices, on virtually any screen size and resolution.

The IGHHub features a friendly back-end user interface, which allows administrators and editors add tons of content, media items, files and more with a few clicks. The large database is easy to manage and a custom search engine, based on Solr, grants quick access to any piece of content.

Moreover, the content adding, editing and deletion system is optimized for fast publication and updating. The entire content and user database is highly protected and backed up regularly to prevent data alteration of any kind. VerticalWave Solutions also provides ongoing maintenance and support for the entire project.

We’re sure that with a powerful tool like the Hub platform to serve their needs, the guys at The Institute of Global Homeless will be able to fight homelessness in a much more efficient and productive way.

Drupal is without doubt one of the most versatile content management systems on the market when it comes to handle large content and user databases. B2B and B2C companies often look to convert such data, as well as website user engagement into leads and potential customers. This is where Drupal CRM Integration comes in extremely handy. Pairing Drupal with an optimally tailored CRM provides excellent business automation, allowing companies collect and manage crucial data and thus ensuring a better ROI.

Drupal can be integrated with various available CRMs, including the most popular ones such as SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics. However, these CRM systems provide less flexibility and additional coding, as well as third party support might be required to ensure optimal implementation.

On the other hand, there are a few Customer Relationship Management systems that work almost “out of the box” when integrated with Drupal 7 and 8. This seamless integration is provided via dedicated modules and APIs, as well as custom codes, and widely supported by the Drupal developers’ community.

A successful integration creates a link between the two systems, ensuring successful field mapping, data transfer and management. Drupal can gather and send data collected through webforms or through user analysis in real time to the CRM to maximize marketing efficiency. To a certain extent, we can say that the outcome is a powerful 2 in 1 content management and marketing platform.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common CRM solutions that work best when paired with Drupal:

• First we have Drupal’s native CRM module, which can handle contacts and form management and requires little coding to set up. The advantage when using Drupal’s own CRM system is that it can actively be updated and maintained with little cost. No third party hosting or configuration is involved when using it.
• RedHen is another CRM that offers native Drupal integration. It offers lots of customizable features and is mostly used to track the interaction with people and institutions. Its flexibility makes it suitable for various business models.
• CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management solution best used to track webform input, online subscription, contacts and more. Designed initially for non-profit and non-governmental entities, CiviCRM can also be set to accommodate B2B and B2C companies.
• Zoho CRM is comprised of a powerful suite of business tools, highly scalable, designed to cover a wide array of features needed to enhance the marketing process. It uses an automated system to gather, keep track and assign leads and analyze product demand, customer data, as well as the entire sales process if needed.

As said, these CRM systems offer reliable integration with Drupal and provide lots of flexibility. However, implementing the best suited solution for a specific company or organization requires a careful analysis to highlight particular needs, depending on the business and organizational model.

The VerticalWave Solutions team is proud to announce the launch of E-Mentoring Halton, a new generation type of collaboration platform, dedicated to provide online mentoring partnerships for residents of Halton Region. It is a complex program, designed to bridge the gap between established professionals and professionals immigrating to the Region of Halton in occupational-specific mentoring relationships. Moreover, the platform is engineered to facilitate communication between program participants, across the world at any time zone.

This is a scalable system, tailored to put the most efficient collaboration, communication and sharing tools at the fingertips of e-Mentors and e-Mentees. The challenge was to merge all functionality features with an intuitive and easy to use design for the end-user and for system administrators.

Using the powerful Drupal CMS, our team successfully implemented a wide variety of functional features and a modern responsive design, combining state of the art mobile and desktop UI and UX into an interactive and secure specialty platform.

E-Mentoring Halton boasts an innovative resource sharing system, which provides users with access to documents, videos, links and notes. Users have the possibility to communicate via comments or the integrated instant messaging system. At the same time they can schedule meetings and calls to enhance their collaboration and reach the end goal easier, while a built-in notification system alerts users and administrators of various activities via email.

System administrators can easily designate groups and associate users with them and create specific modules, tasks and evaluations for each group and user. Moreover, the content and user management system is designed to provide easy admin access to all resources and user accounts. Administrators control the back-end and entire collaboration system in a very straight-forward way to ensure the lowest interaction latency time possible.

As said, the E-Mentoring Halton platform is based on custom functionalities and employs many features, but using the latest Drupal 7 installment, combined with custom built modules, a clean and well-structured programming code and a solid database system, our team has delivered a modern, customizable and reliable solution for the client.

Part of the Ontarian set of laws intended to improve accessibility for people with disabilities, the AODA – Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act adopted back in 2005 is intended to implement and enforce accessibility standards for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to everyday life aspects like goods, services, employment, accommodation, healthcare, facilities, transport and more kh0csxv.

The act eliminates what is called a barrier in terms of technology, information, communication and more for people with mental or physical disabilities. The Act is a major step forward in the history of fighting against discrimination of persons with disabilities in Ontario, therefore supported by individuals, as well as by government entities and companies alike.

The AODA sets of rules and standards concern the internet perhaps more than anything else. Ontario based websites need to comply with these regulations or are susceptible to penalties that can even escalate to lawsuits. The Act clearly specifies that government entities, public sector organizations, enterprises and related businesses must align their websites and web applications with the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, intended to make website browsing and content access easily available to people with different levels of disabilities, from cognitive limitations to physical impairment.

AODA complaint websites will become the standard in the upcoming years, as the Act’s rules and regulations must be fully adopted and implemented by 2025, as stipulated by the law. However, implementing the necessary accessibility features requires both analysis and development to ensure correct design and functionality and a win-win outcome for visitors and users as well as for website and web apps operators and owners.

The most common implementation of the AODA compliance for web projects is based on the technical standard WCAG 2.0 levels:

• Level A (lowest), which implies a logical app/site structure, audio control, keyboard access, text alternative for non-text content, responsible use of colors, video and audio captions and more

• Level AA (intermediate), which implies live captions, audio alternative to text, text resizing options, sensitive data secured management, pre-set contrast ratio, use of clear and accessible icons, links and buttons, and more

• Level AAA (advanced), which implies translations, media alternatives, intuitive visual layout, keyboard accessibility, location and geo-location services, optimal readability level, help and instruction regarding site browsing and functionality and more

At VerticalWave Solutions we support the AODA and work close with our clients to implement intuitive and correct accessibility features across all the websites, apps and platforms we develop. This is a complex process, starting with website/app/project audit and continuing with responsible research and development to reach the end goal. Our Drupal projects integrate modern UI and UX with intuitive accessibility features. A close focus on design and functionality on both mobile and desktop platforms ensures a successful project delivery and seamless integration with the AODA rules and regulations.

Text resizing, text to speech, full featured content, accurate search, responsive and adaptive design, mobile friendly interface, quick access buttons, media integration, intuitive menus are just a few of the required accessibility features we successfully implemented for important clients like The C.D. Howe Institute, GREO – Gambling Research Exchange Ontario, YouthREX, <a href="https://verticalhq find more info.ca/portfolio_item/the-homeless-hub”>The Homeless Hub and more.  All of our clients’ websites and apps are fully comply with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act as required for an optimal web experience.

The Vertical Wave Solutions team is proud to announce the launch of C.D. Howe Institute’s new website. With the mission to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies, the C.D. Howe Institute is a prestigious, independent not-for-profit research organization, considered by many to be Canada’s most influential think tank.

According to the Institute’s requirements, our VerticalWave Solutions team migrated the original website content from an old platform to Drupal CMS, created a fresh and modern look for the new website, as well as improved the administration and content management procedures for the client. The challenge was to create a new, visually appealing website, rich in features and easy to manage, while staying true to CD Howe Institute’s brand and substance. Our team successfully delivered a website that met all these principles.

The new website features a modern, responsive design, which renders perfectly on desktops, laptops and mobile devices, boasting a user friendly front end interface which makes browsing simple and intuitive, and provides fast access to content. The C.D Howe Institute website now integrates complex features like subscription system, advanced search, structured library, event management platform, third party service integration, dynamic featured content and more.

Backed up by a user-oriented and easy to use back-end administration system, as well as by an organized structure, the site can be easily managed without advanced technical skills. We are proud to have put technology in the right form, right at our client’s finger tips.

VerticalWave Solutions also provides ongoing support and maintenance for C.D. Howe.

Considered the ‘next gen’ of web development, MEAN Stack represents a collection of technologies that merge together perfectly in order to offer a a full-stack JavaScript implementation of web applications. Mean Stack consists of MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js, hence the acronym MEAN.

These combined technologies allow for easy, intuitive and efficient development of scalable, user-friendly web applications which offer a new level of performance and reliability for the end user. And the flexibility and ease of use make MEAN Stack a powerful competitor against proven archetypal web service solution stacks such as LAMP. Comprised of Linux operating system, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP programming language, LAMP is still powerful, but starts losing ground in front of the MEAN newcomer.

And there are a few good reasons why MEAN Stack has the upper hand over LAMP in some particular areas. MongoDB is cloud-ready and offers reliable support and automatic replication over the cluster of servers, compared with MySQL, which might provide a strong relational database, but it’s a bit more restrictive, requiring data to be pushed into tables.

Another advantage of the new MEAN Stack is that Node.js simplifies the server layer. It does the work with some JavaScript and having everything in one layer prevents confusion and minimizes the occurrence of bugs. LAMP features multiple layers of navigation with various configuration files and differing syntax, which all combined can make a developer’s work quite difficult at times. Another advantage of Node.js is that it is faster, which makes it perfect for mobile apps.

AngularJS is another advantage of MEAN Stack. It adds consistency and stability by anointing one client framework, by allowing easy migration of code between content management systems and by allowing the coder work without hassle on the client’s side. LAMP benefits from solid PHP-based frameworks that work with MySQL, but has nothing to offer close to AngularJS.

Part of the developer community considers that LAMP might become obsolete in the near future. It’s not the case yet, as LAMP is still a reliable ‘player’, which has proven its efficiency over the years, but MEAN Stack is definitely a new, innovative, cutting-edge technology package that will most likely conquer the market soon.

Benefitting from a large support community, Drupal is one of the most widely used content management systems today. It is the perfect CMS for personal, corporate or government sites and has multiple uses, from simple presentation websites to custom community or e-commerce platforms. Drupal is intuitive, highly secure, SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, easy to integrate with existing code and more.

One of the major advantages of using Drupal as your content management system is that it can adapt to virtually any browser and operating system without hassle. It saves you time and money when it comes to render your site’s content on all popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on the widely used Windows, MacOS and Linux OS platforms. It also works perfectly on less known and used browsers and operating systems.

The great thing about Drupal is that it is backwards compatible. That means that it can easily adapt to previous versions of a particular browser or OS. Other CMSs have the same feature too, but their compatibility can be limited and require longer development time to adapt to older OS and browser versions. On the other hand, Drupal offers a perfect browsing experience (both in terms of graphics and functionality) with just minor tweaks.

It is always recommended to use the latest OS and browser version available, but many users ignore this recommendation. The use the systems they are accustomed with their favorite plugins to or are not interesting in upgrading. This is why Drupal comes in handy and helps you reach a wider audience. And remember that Drupal offers a superior and user-friendly browsing experience on mobile devices running Android and iOS too.

As Drupal is one of the most versatile content management systems today, it is widely used for corporate, e-commerce, government and a wide range of other projects and sites. Drupal is a highly secure, highly scalable CMS which empowers web presence for a multitude of projects.

Flexibility, easy administration, possibility to integrate with existent and future modules and pieces of code, intelligent web publishing, mobile friendliness, huge support community and multilingual capabilities are just a few of the features that make Drupal such a popular and widely used CMS.

Let’s take a look at who uses Drupal:
– The White House: www.whitehouse.gov
– The Economist: www.economist.com
– Oxfam: www.oxfam.org
– The French Government: www.gouvernement.fr
– Eric Clapton: www.ericclapton.com
– Fujifilm: www.fujifilm.com
– The British Government: www.direct.gov.uk
– The Louvre Museum: www.louvre.fr
– Ikea: www.ikea.com
– Chris Rock: www.chrisrock.com
– ING: www.ing.com
– Rafael Nadal: www.rafaelnadal.com

And the list goes on. As you can see, governments, major institutions and corporations and famous artists use and trust Drupal. This makes it one of the most legitimate and trustworthy CMSs on the market.

By now we already know that Drupal is a very efficient content management system, able to meet personal and corporate needs, a reliable way to empower your presence on the internet. Its modules are highly scalable and provide you with access to the latest web technologies.

But Drupal is much more than a simple and efficient CMS. It is a tool that will boost you ROI rate from the first moment you deploy your website on the internet. Let’s see how this is possible.

First of all, Drupal is easy to configure and does not require dedicated admins to run the website. This means that after the site is created, you or anyone else can manage it without any hassle. With little training, you are in complete control of your website.

At the same time, Drupal has powerful SEO modules that can help you increase your visibility on the internet at a fast pace. The better the visibility, the more visitors you get imp source. Running SEO campaigns for a Drupal sased website is very efficient. And this translates into cash. Drupal is also easy to integrate with social media, so you can communicate easily with your friends and customers via Facebook, Twitter or any other media platform.

Drupal is a mobile friendly CMS. By using it, the development team can create mobile versions of your website in a short time, or design adaptive or responsive sites that can be managed very easily. This means that you don’t need to create separate apps or spend tons of money on mobile design.

Drupal websites are also easy to maintain, and do not require additional development when it is time to update them. Security updates are also easy to implement and very cost effective. Thanks to its large support community, Drupal is constantly evolving and grants you access to new and rick open source features that will make your site shine on the web.