This talk will cover how we work on 3 separate Drupal installs with a relatively small team and the lessons we've learnt over the years.
In addition I'll be covering technical, project management and stakeholder engagement challenges we've overcome.
I've been working as a Drupal developer at the University of Westminster for the past few months.
Our main website is on Drupal 7 and we've been migrating it over to Drupal 8, a section at a time. Both are currently live and we handle which website should be shown to users using Cloudflare rules based on the path. We will be retiring our Drupal 7 website in a few months once all migration work is complete.
We also have a separate Drupal 8 installation for our Short Courses website. We decided this would be best as we have Salesforce and Commerce integration requirements and the other websites do not. We pull course data from Salesforce CRM (using the Salesforce suite contrib module and custom module code), then take visitors through a Drupal Commerce checkout experience, before finally exporting back to Salesforce and Agresso finance system.
I'll be covering
- Technical challenges with Drupal, why we love it and how we've gone about customising it
- How we planned the migration of our complex large scale website, and how we adapted the plan as we went on the project
- How our Scrum team works as a team, balances the needs of different stakeholders and an insight into what tools we use
- How we went through a re-design process with our UI and UX designers, before implementing these into GEL (Global Experience Language), and then finally with development
- The approaches we've taken with content migration and automated testing with Selenium
As a result of this I learned to better handle web projects as a Drupal developer, communicate with the team better and keep an eye out for any interdependencies that rely on other people. I'll be sharing the importance of these lessons with you too.