The following blog was written by Drupal Association Premium Supporting Partner, Deeson.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/

Deeson designed and built a powerful digital platform to harness Imperial War Museums' collection and drive deeper engagement with their events.

The brief.

Deeson was asked to support Imperial War Museums (IWM) in evaluating the effectiveness of their existing digital presence in helping them meet their strategic goals. After a strategic and technical audit, IWM elected to rebuild their website.

They tasked us with launching their new website as a groundbreaking "sixth site" to sit alongside the museum's five physical branches. The site needed to showcase the museum's rich content in compelling new ways.

The results.

We created a bold new website powered by Drupal 8 that is a confident declaration of what Imperial War Museums represents, and reflects the urgency and importance of the subject matter.

The visually arresting design brings to life IWM's collection, branches, and the rich variety of their public programme of events and exhibitions, enabling them to tell the fascinating stories formerly buried deep within their collection.

Why Drupal was chosen.

Imperial War Museums' previous site had been built in Drupal 7, and their team includes an in-house Drupal developer. As we were rebuilding the entire site, we selected Drupal 8 as an effective platform for practising continuous development.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome). 

Auditing the estate.

Deeson kicked off the project with an in-depth audit of IWM's existing web estate. The goal of the audit was to identify the gap between where the museum's digital offer currently was and where it needed to be to meet its strategic objectives.

During the audit, we met with key stakeholders, performed analysis on the accessibility of the site, thoroughly investigated the way the previous site had been built, and assessed the impact this site was having on the museum's brand and commercial viability.

The evidence revealed that the existing site and content management system required development. The gaps between what IWM wanted to achieve and what the technology could deliver were hindering the museum's capable internal team from achieving their goals. From this investigation, we identified Drupal 8 as the right choice of platform for the rebuild.

Foundations phase.

The goal of the Foundations phase was to identify the best way to roll out the museum's new website. We carried out a series of activities including design days run by a UX designer to test assumptions about user behaviour, and technology workshops to develop a deeper understanding of the museum's integration requirements.

Within weeks we had a prioritised requirements list and were able to produce wireframes of key page types, provide design direction, and put forward a detailed delivery schedule.

Build approach.

Following an in-depth analysis of IWM's existing infrastructure and technical requirements, we created an inventory of technologies in use and formulated a plan for which ones we would integrate in the first phase of development.

We adopted the DSDM approach to production for this project, delivering a workable solution after each increment to be used by the client for internal testing, demonstration purposes, and content entry as appropriate. Deeson's team collaborated closely with IWM's internal designer and Drupal developer to deliver the new site.

The project was delivered as a single Drupal 8 release in January 2018, replacing Imperial War Museums' existing website.

Organizations involved. 

Deeson

Key modules/theme/distribution used. 

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen. 

Paragraphs

Paragraphs allows us to create reusable content patterns that fit well with the principles of component-based design.

Media Entity / Inline Entity Form / Entity Browser

Media and media management was integral to the success of the project. These modules helped us build a fully-featured media library for adding and reusing media across the site.

Remote Stream Wrapper / Entity Browser remote stream wrapper widget

These tools helped us build an integration with IWM's internal digital asset management platform for sharing media resources, in combination with the Media suite of modules.

Config Split

Because we use a strict build and deployment workflow, configuration changes usually get wiped-out. Config Split helps us manage administratively controlled configuration, such as Webforms.

Warden

We used Warden to monitor the website status and platform security throughout the project.

Team members. 

markpavlitski

Categories: Drupal 8.x, Non-profit