Project Plan

Proposed Platform

• Drupal 11
• Pantheon hosting
• Google Analytics with custom tracking
• Cloudflare CDN

Platform Considerations

Drupal vs. Wordpress

These two platforms stand out as natural candidates for a project of this nature. We have worked with both, and have experienced the pros and cons of each.

Wordpress tends to have a better editing experience out of the box, especially for basic use cases. However, its underlying architecture can become unwieldy as sites grow, and can hinder feature development. Some of the compelling aspects, such as the visually intuitive block editor, come with their own unique costs, such as increased development effort to keep editor UI in sync with rendered block output. As you move beyond a classic blog-like site model, you start to feel the limitations of the way content is structured and stored in Wordpress.

Drupal tends to have a steeper learning curve for developers and site builders, but offers a more robust and flexible platform. Its editing experience is less elegant out of the box, but can be customized to be more user-friendly. Drupal is much better at content modeling than Wordpress, and we plan to take full advantage of this when architecting your site. By creating custom content types, fields, and relationships, we can ensure that your content is structured in a way that is not only intuitive for editors but opens up exciting possibilities in terms of presenting content dynamically throughout the site, adhering to consistent, component-based design, and more.

From a market and community perspective, we feel that the recent drama (between Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg and commercial Wordpress provider WPEngine, in particular) is another reason to hesitate before committing to Wordpress. Like any open source project, Drupal has its own tensions between community and commercial interests, but the landscape is more stable. From a platform perspective, Drupal underwent a major rearchitecture in the past decade, and has recently been reaping the benefits of a more robust, standardized framework, a more consistent update cycle, etc.

Decoupled vs. Traditional Architecture

We are proposing a traditional Drupal site, rather than a decoupled architecture. This means that the site will be rendered using Drupal's built-in front-end theming system, rather than a separate front-end framework using React/Nextjs/Vue/etc. We have built (and continue to build) decoupled sites for certain use cases. However, we feel that a traditional Drupal site is the best fit for this project. It will be easier to build, maintain, and extend. Some of the CMS back-ends that people typically use with headless/decoupled sites can also be great from a content modeling perspective and a component-based design perspective. However, with most decoupled sites, there is a major challenge in terms of editors seeing the impact of their editing (i.e. you can't really see what your changes will look like while you're making them, and it often takes a while to see how it looks on the actual publish page). There are ways to overcome this, but they increase project cost, and our preferred platforms in that space are not open source. With our proposed Drupal implementation, we will take steps to strengthen the editing experience, implement a smart caching and delivery strategy to maximize performance, and follow best practices for a secure site ecosystem.

Key Elements of Our Solution

• Design that upholds your style guide and creates a fresh, modern look for your site
• Design and content strategy to help you communicate what makes 4Cs unique. This includes a focus on your aviation program, your Barnstable campus, your faculty and student stories, your creative marketing efforts, and more.
• Intelligent content architecture designed to support the new design as well as future evolution
• New library of components that can be used to build/augment pages throughout the site
• Robust theming and responsive design that is thoughtful enough to handle a variety of content and layout changes
• Responsive image styles with support for custom cropping and/or focal point selection
• Images optimized for performance and accessibility
• Solid defaults for meta tags and social sharing, with support for customizations
• Re-architected site navigation
• Tasteful Google Translate implementation
• Ability to support native content and interface translation as needed in the future using Drupal's built-in multilingual capabilities
• Media Library with support for various media types (including images, videos, and documents)
• Media Library customization to improve your ability to find and manage media assets
• Caching strategy to improve performance and reduce hosting costs without sacrificing content freshness
• Improved faculty/staff/administration directory
• Site search with faceting, content-type-specific results, search term highlighting, suggestions, etc.
• New ways of presenting academic catalog data. Integrate with CleanCatalog via API. Display course info in an attractive, user-friendly way. Show relationships between courses, prerequisites, programs, faculty, academic calendar, etc.
• Better calendar and event display. Integrate with 25Live via API. Show events in a more engaging way, with better filtering options, etc. Integrate events more seamlessly into website content.
• Program finder with helpful search and filtering options (e.g. by department, degree type, location, etc.)
• Content, menus, and calls to action designed to empower key personas/user groups (e.g. high school students, MassReconnect students, other prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, first-generation college students, etc.)
• Intelligent content audit, migration, and authoring support
• SEO and AI search visibility optimization

Timeline

• February, 2025
  • Kickoff meetings. Build rapport, establish roles and responsibilities, learn communication styles/preferences, etc.
  • Collaborative discovery process and stakeholder engagement
  • Work with CCCC to access current website and prepare for additional discovery work
  • Establish technical strategy for developing and testing new site while maintaining current site. Provision hosting infrastructure.
  • Establish project management tools and processes that work well for both teams
  • Deep dive into current site
• March-April, 2025
  • Review and discuss CCCC’s recent user research
  • Translate feedback into action steps/features
  • Work with core stakeholders to triage and prioritize potential actions/features
  • Delineate personas and use cases
  • Site map, navigation, and content architecture work
  • Iterative visual design process in consultation with CCCC design stakeholders
• May, 2025
  • Complete iterative visual design process
  • Finalize site map, navigation, and content architecture work
• April-June, 2025
  • Content/site architecture implementation on new dev site
  • Iterative development process
  • Selected content migration and transition work
• June-July, 2025
  • Regularly update dev/test sites with new features and gather feedback from stakeholders
  • Continue full-stack development, with focus shifting toward front-end dev/theming
  • Directory and academic catalog-related work
  • Other systems integration work
  • Additional content migration and transition work
• August, 2025
  • Complete primary full-stack development process
  • Additional technical and user acceptance testing
  • Team training sessions
  • New content creation, updates, revisions, etc.
  • Empower content teams and address any issues that arise.
  • Triage potential issues according to pre/post-launch priority
  • Public beta availability and feedback solicitation
• September, 2025
  • Pre-launch phases, including integration testing, load testing, etc.
  • CDN configuration and launch preparation
  • Final site tuning
  • Public site launch
• September-October, 2025
  • Post-launch support
  • Additional training and guidance