Project Objectives:
For this project we had some very concrete objectives:
- Migrate existing Drupal 7 website to Drupal 9
- Design and component updates, but not a full redesign. Visual updates as well as as accessibility code updates.
Highlights:
First highlight was the content migrations. The Drupal 7 site was a fairly old site that I believe was upgraded from Drupal 6. There was a lot of technical debt in the old site. You could see the different development changes in each of the content types.
Another fun part was creating custom entities for this site. Longwood gardens has a custom map that they display on their site with content integrated from the website. Bluecadet created the frontend for the map a few years back, and updating the front end was not part of this scope. For this upgrade we decided to move the content pieces of the map to custom entities. The map is very much a separate element of the site. It was nice to remove this content from typical node types and the default content of Drupal. We could also isolate and customize the admin experience for maps.
Longwood Gardens has unique structure to their physical location which we mimicked on their site. The physical location has "Districts" and within each District, there are multiple "Gardens". We were able to create custom code throughout the site and theme to create connections and reuse content throughout Districts and Gardens.
Most sites we develop, we typically use the Focal Point module to manage image crops automatically. We will use Image Widget Crop if the project dictates it. However, on this site we primarily wanted to use focal point for the automatic crops, but we had a few places the client wanted to be able to use a custom crop that also wasn't restricted by aspect ratio. We added in some functionality so we could combine Focal Point and Image Widget Crop functionality throughout the site by creating more form options for media items.
