About the UNC School of Government

Founded in 1931, the UNC School of Government is the oldest and most diversified of its kind in the nation. The School provides local and state government officials of North Carolina with nonpartisan legal, public administration, management and financial expertise. In addition to advising, faculty members engage in research and publications. The School also offers a nationally-ranked Master of Public Administration program.

The Project

The UNC School of Government publishes a full format version of North Carolina Crimes: A Guidebook on the Elements of Crime by Jessica Smith every five years. The work is a large format reference book used by a variety of individuals in the legal profession, containing breakdowns for every statute in the North Carolina code with extensive notes and cross references between items. The most recent edition contains more than 800 pages that cover more than 1,900 North Carolina statutes within 28 chapters. It receives an annual update via a series of smaller cumulative supplement books.

The School wanted to bring this publication and its supplements to the Web in a format that supported fast searching, browsing, and cross-referencing between sections. Because of the book’s size and bulk, the UNC School of Government envisioned a format that would allow lawyers to quickly access the reference work on tablets and laptops in the courtroom. The work is accessed by paid subscription.

The School collaborated with the team at DesignHammer to create a rich user experience.

Examples of responsive design for the NC Crimes online reference book
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Drupal provided a solid infrastructure for this project due to the ability to easily create content types with fields, link those content types, and leverage the Migrate module to provide an easy interface for importing and updating content.

The School of Government was using a Drupal 6 multisite installation for a number of other projects. Additionally, some initial proof of concept work had been done in Drupal to test displaying their publication content in a Drupal site. It made sense to build out the project using a familiar tool, especially since we expected to use a repeatable content-focused workflow, which we knew Drupal could support.

We used Drupal 6 in a multi-site configuration running on Acquia Dev Cloud. This allowed us to deploy the site in the same environment as other School of Government sites, which decreased their ongoing maintenance cost.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The UNC School of Government sought to convert its printed reference work, North Carolina Crimes: A Guidebook on the Elements of Crime, and its supplements to a website accessed through paid subscription.

The project’s primary goal was to execute a rich Web experience for users of the online edition while also maintaining the reference-like nature of the print version. This would include features such as keyword search and cross-linking references.

With multiple teams on each side of the project, one project manager from the School and one from DesignHammer served as primary points of contact. This allowed for coordination within each team and organized channels of communication across sides. Regular agile-style sprints with milestones and reviews helped the project move quickly and efficiently.

We structured the project around two major phases of work. The first phase focused on migrating the existing NC Crimes book content into Drupal.

Achieving Content Migration through Drupal Migrate

The book’s content existed as Adobe InDesign files geared toward print publication. These raw files could not be used for the website, nor did they provide the information needed to create cross-links.

Content migration was executed through labor-intensive manual work by working with the School’s IT and publication staff to define an XML format for the content. Through this process, we were able to preserve the relationships between different parts of the book.

More than 800 pages were manually tagged and exported as XML files, which were then converted to Drupal nodes using a custom migration in Drupal Migrate.

A mixture of content processing stages were used to validate the XML, establish cross-links and allow for features such as files attachments.

UI/UX, Responsive Design and Custom Formatting

The unique formatting elements of NC Crimes created a challenge for the DesignHammer team to capture the layout specifics on each page, such as the custom handling of lists and display of statute references.

“Example

Working with the School, we defined a detailed HTML specification to provide very fine-grained control of how the book’s content is displayed. This allows the Web content to closely match the physical book’s formatting, creating familiarity for users of the print work.

The second phase of the project focused on improving the user interface and expanding migration functionality for publication staff, which would allow the School to provide the most recent supplemental material in the online format.

We designed the custom-built interface to create an improvement over the print experience by allowing imported supplemental material to display alongside the original material.

“Original

Initial development of the book menu in phase one utilized the Advanced Book Blocks module; this was replaced in phase two with custom code to make navigation more user friendly and better support the book’s menu content.

The custom code also enables asynchronous navigation of the reference work.

For optimized use on tablet and mobile devices, the custom theme takes advantage of modern Web browser techniques, and was heavily tested for use on mobile devices.

Because the code for the new interface was written from scratch by the team at DesignHammer, its functionality better supports the book’s content, provides faster load times and is an overall improvement in user experience.

Outcomes

  • Phase one shipped on time and under budget with additional functionality that wasn’t in the original scope of work.
  • The final product is a system that allows the School of Government’s content owners to upload new versions of the XML files, with the ability to see the latest content populated in Drupal in the correct format and ready for display on the Web.
  • The School successfully and independently published the latest annual supplement in April 2014.

We continue to see a steady influx of new subscribers, and we hope interest will continue to grow. Katrina Hunt, Publications Division Manager, UNC School of Government

Technical specifications

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Our module choices were focused heavily towards sustainable development. The project involved a large amount of custom code and configuration and needed to be deployable in a variety of local and shared environments.

Features, Strongarm, Context, and Boxes gave us a lot of control over what parts of the site’s configuration would be captured in code.

Environment Indicator was a great way to keep the development, publications, and administrative teams all on the same page when reviewing the various code changes, content imports, and layout adjustments in the different environments. We used a conf variable to set the indicator text to reflect the current Acquia environment.

Migrate was a key component in the project. It allowed us to define a structured format for the content and rapidly test the full import throughout the project. The full migration has been run hundreds of times in development and is regularly used by the publishing team to update and import new content in production.

This process has given us a high degree of confidence in the migration.

Organizations involved: 
Team members: 
Project team: 

Jay Roberts, developer: Project Manager and Lead Developer
Frank Yonnetii, DesignHammer partner and designer: Lead Designer

Sectors: 
Education
Government
Legal Industry
Publishing