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 The primary issues were a slow-loading website, lack of design flexibility, and an outdated search system, as well as a heavy backend system.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.
Migrating such a large-scale website, with over 30,000 resources and more than 10,000 contributor profiles, posed several challenges:
Our approach to the migration was carefully planned to ensure seamless execution:
Several custom solutions added exceptional value to the project:
The website migration resulted in significant improvements:
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.
The Homeless Hub is a web-based research library and information center, a platform which offers information about homelessness from across Canada. It provides easy access to information for services providers, researchers, government representatives, students, and readers and it hosts a large number of contributors to its information database.
By using the powerful features of the Drupal CMS, VerticalWave put the latest technology to good use in order to enhance knowledge mobilization and networking. Homeless Hub represents a new interactive platform, which provides users with simplified and fast access to information. Users now can easy access and share the wealth of information on homelessness.
The Homeless Hub also features an advanced and highly efficient search engine based on the powerful Apache Solr, which allows users to search for all the Hubs content such as: reports, papers, e-books, summaries, studies, multimedia and more. The Hub is also integrated with all the large social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, etc. and it features a user-friendly blog section.
The Canadian Housing First Toolkit is a complementary resource site for the Homeless Hub funded by The Mental Health Commission of Canada. The Housing First Toolkit represents an informational hub and resource site which helps Canadians get more involved in the housing aspect of homelessness.This website main’s audience are the doctors, planners, government-policy makers, researchers, as well as general audience.
Just like in the case of the Homeless Hub, the information and resources of this site are easy to manage by the editorial team using the custom back-end Drupal administration interface. The Canadian Housing First Toolkit is also available in French.
VerticalWave is proud to be a part of the team behind the Homeless Hub and Canadian Housing First Toolkit projects and help with such a pressing and yet misunderstood social issue like homelessness.