CH2M

Chapter Three helped CH2M become the first Fortune 500 company to boast a Drupal 8 website. CH2M entrusted Chapter Three to build its Drupal 8 site because of the innovative, pioneering spirit that our companies share. We worked with CH2M and its branding agency to create a critical piece of a major rebranding effort -- the first in two decades.

With Drupal 8 core maintainer Alex Pott on staff, Chapter Three leveraged Alex’s first-hand knowledge of the project to showcase the power of Drupal 8 on CH2M’s site. Alex provided leadership and inspiration throughout the project, helping navigate the major changes that Drupal 8 brings. Using Drupal 8’s Twig templating system, Chapter Three implemented a complex, robust design that translates seamlessly into a mobile experience.

A COMPONENT BASED ARCHITECTURE

Our front-end development team themed the site on a component level so that the relationship between Drupal and the site architecture and design is 1 to 1. Because Drupal 8 only loads the templates required for the immediate situation, Drupal became a theming asset rather than an obstacle. The Twig theme layer provided our developers with a dedicated and mature templating language.

The result was a massive increase in the power of our tool kit and a faster, easier theming process. Removing logic from template files, taking advantage of features like removing whitespace and adding classes to preprocessed data allowed us to separate coding concerns and write substantially better code.

A PROFESSIONAL SYSTEM THAT SEPARATES THE PROS FROM THE REST

Drupal 8’s Twig templating system shone a spotlight on quality theming, requiring our developers to use Model-View-Controller (MVC) principles and emphasize best practices. Our developers embraced the component-based Sass architecture and its auto-integration with Drupal data. We were able to use exclusively modern practices, resulting in a rock solid css architecture with pre-processing, linting and auto-generating documentation.

With the model of a truly cutting-edge site like CH2M, the entire Chapter Three team understands the advantage of working with Drupal 8, a sentiment that is sure to spread quickly among dedicated coders worldwide.

Drupal 8 legitimized the blocks, creating a complete system for creating and using non-node content. Now, a single block can appear in the sidebar and the footer or be restricted to certain nodes in one section and certain content types in another. A block or other entity can be referenced by a node, separating concerns of how to handle the display of specific pieces of content. We leveraged this to display employee calling card blocks throughout the CH2M site.

MIGRATING CONFIGRATION BETWEEN ENVIRONMENTS TO SPEED UP DEVELOPMENT

Drupal 8’s configuration management initiative allowed our team to migrate CH2M content during development by syncing configuration changes. This was especially useful when working with beta upgrades and continues to offer benefits in the post-launch phase.

Our development team wrote content management code to migrate content as well as configuration. The code is specific to CH2M, but the concepts are generalized so that we can release a contrib module to benefit the community. With each new release of Drupal 8, we can utilize these tools to easily take advantages of regular improvements.

HIGH PERFORMANCE OUT OF THE BOX

Caching was a top priority when architecting Drupal 8 and improved asset management also provides a performance boost. Because Drupal 8 only ships with the basic framework, there is less to take away, making it anywhere between 2 and 200 times faster out of the box than Drupal 7.