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By Cheeky Monkey Media on
The Client
Betteryouknow.org is a website for women and men who may experience symptoms of a bleeding disorder, but have not been diagnosed. The Website hopes to raise awareness and knowledge of bleeding disorders as part of National Hemophilia Foundation’s (NHF) Better You Know campaign.
The Opportunity
NHF came to Cheeky Monkey Media because they found that their website needed some updates to make it easier to add new content, and needed a complete multilanguage site - available in English and Spanish. The design and initial development had been working well for them, however they found that there were a few issues with the way the sidebar navigation was built and how some of the content was hardcoded. This made it more difficult for content editors, as changes to how the content was formatted could break the look and feel of various portions of the site.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Prior to taking over maintenance on this project, NHF had just shifted all of their major sites to Drupal, to standardize on one content management system (CMS). Drupal 8 was chosen for this site to take advantage of new features such as improved multi language support, which provides a better editing experience. They also wanted to take advantage of building on Drupal 8, which has a longer support time span than Drupal 7, which was at the end of its term of support.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
NHF wanted to make the editing experience easier and more intuitive to update. They also wanted to convert the entire site into both English and Spanish versions. After reviewing the proposal and meeting with the NHF team, we agreed on the following as the key goals and deliverables:
Goals
- Improve sidebar navigation and use Drupal menu system rather than hard coded blocks.
- Offer the site in both English and Spanish.
- Improve content editor experience and reusable components.
Deliverables
- New sidebar navigation
- Multi language support
- Reusable paragraph components
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Throughout the discovery process Cheeky Monkey Media discovered the sidebar navigation was built using Drupal’s block system, rather than utilizing Drupal’s menu system. This made it difficult for adding new content, as these blocks needed to be rebuilt whenever adding new pages.
We updated this to use the Drupal menu system to make it much easier for content editors to add new pages to the menu. We also leveraged the Menu Attributes module to allow adding custom classes to menu items, to allow the client to display of icons with their menu links.
Because Drupal 8 now comes with built in language support, no external modules were needed. Basic configuration of the Language module allowed us to set both languages (English and Spanish). Once this was complete we began to configure Content Translation settings to allow for translation support for the various entities. Additional theming was done to the header to allow for easier page translation.
Paragraphs was also added to allow for easier content entry and layout. This included creating a new paragraph type for accordions as well as media. This allowed content editors to build out pages quicker and reuse components across the site.
Custom implementation of the Addthis social sharing widget was added to share images easier. This allows users to hover over images and share them directly to social media rather than sharing the page itself.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Healthcare
Non-profit
