Project details
Background
In 2017 the website of the Nordic Co-operation was in a poor state. The CMS behind the scenes had substandard performance, timeouts and no real option to upgrade the CMS, due to outdated modules and custom code. A change was needed to provide a web site for the organisation and its interested parties.
The old norden.org was a beast! The website including all assets it weighed over 300GB. Along with many different content types such as: Political cases, border hinderance issues, questions from nordic citizens, news, events, sub-sites, organisations, people in organisations and a lot more.
All these content types had their own logic and some would fire events in the background as an example creating a news letter campaign. The existing functionality of the website and its data needed to be migrated as well to a new platform.
A pre-project was launched in order to research what CMS would be right for the multilingual content. A tender for the project was written and we found the right provider for the job, and development on the new norden.org in Drupal 8 started in Q4.
Choice of technology
The most important business criteria of norden.org is the multilingual support, since it serves all the nordic citizens. For editors it should be possible to create content in any of the supported languages and send it in for translation. The translation is made manually by the localization staff at the Nordic Councils of ministers. Who needs a good and perhaps better workflow than before. The top list of criteria for the decision of a CMS ended up like:
- Multilingual
- Performance
- Well-known framework/CMS (for support)
- Open source
After consulting experts in content management system and researching the options, Drupal was the most favorable pick of a CMS that checked all the boxes on the criteria list.
Project and development cycle
We had found a partner who would build the Drupal 8 solution. As a small web team we invested a lot of time writing specifications and descriptions for all the different parts of the platform. During the active development phase we had scrum "daily standups" to check on the progress on the project.
Ton of data was migrated from the old platform. Most of the data I exported to JSON files via scripting, in order to get the data out in the right order and per year. Also adhering to all data relationships.
Integrations were made to many different systems. For newsletters, for career, for organsation overview. And also the in-house made organistion management system OAS.
The project was launched and deployed in September 2018, in order to work out a few adjustments before the nordic top-meetings in the end of October same year.
My role in the project
My role during development in the norden.org project, has been to technically explain and simplify complex solutions. As a project leader I've also been needed to elevate problems and prioritize the development on the most business critical parts. With my background as a developer I can evaluate how time consuming a task might be in relation to its business value, which helps with prioritization.