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The Pacific Community

redesign, Drupal development, and support

home page
member map (Angular JS app and custom Drupal module)
news page

Suva, Fiji

  • Government, Non-Profits
view website

The Pacific Community (SPC) is the principal scientific and technical organisation in the Pacific region, proudly supporting development since 1947.

Brief

SPC’s corporate site had undergone a redesign to WordPress about two years before we got involved, and was running on WordPress. Some other relevant facts:

  • It was not responsive, and needed to be.
  • The site houses many organizational divisions, some of which needed a section within this new site.
  • The site would be used as an example for SPC’s divisions to use on their own sites, which would also run Drupal 8.
  • It needed a method to access blog posts, news and resources via REST web services.

Design and Approach

We designed a new Drupal 8 site from the ground up, including:

  • Wireframes and mockups
  • Discussion of information architecture with SPC
  • A fully custom responsive theme
  • Configuration of relevant content types
  • A custom Angular app / Drupal module for the site’s member map.
  • Areas for updates, news, blog posts, and resources (publications).

Content Migration

We migrated their existing content from WordPress to Drupal. To this end we wrote a custom module that integrates with Drupal’s built-in Migrate module. This was set up to read CSV dumps generated from WordPress, using the WP All Export plugin.

Existing assets were in /wp-content/uploads, and were copied to a folder under Drupal’s /sites/default/files folder. We added PHP rewrites in Drupal’s settings.php to redirect any old WordPress wp-content file requests to the new Drupal location.

The site has many blog posts and news items. We did not migrate their URLs, though. Instead, we opted to install the Search404 module and configure that to automatically redirect to the first result. This results in the same thing, more or less, since it uses search words it finds in the page’s title, and of course the old and new page titles are identical.

Timeline

We started this project in February 2018, launched the new site on July 20, 2018, and have been maintaining it since then. We also built and manage several division Drupal sites for them.