NW Council CMS Rebuild

Technologies Used

Introduction

Northwest Power and Conservation Council manages power generation data, fish and wildlife preservation plans, proposals, and public meetings across the Pacific Northwest (WA, OR, ID, and MT). Their website stores a large number of documents, news articles, proposals, and meeting information.

Problem Set

The group’s website had just been redesigned and rebuilt, but the instance of Drupal that they were using hit an unexpected dead end in terms of developer support. NW Council sought a new software development team that could move the site to a supported CMS while copying the look and feel of the existing site exactly. All the CMS data, of course, had to be migrated as part of the project.

Requirements

• Exact visual reconstruction of the existing site (pixel-perfect)
• Mass data migration from Drupal with zero data loss
• Support for two distinct sites: NW Council (the main site) and Regional Technical Forum (RTF)
• Custom content types: meetings, subcommittees, measures/proposals, news articles, and document repositories
• Ongoing feature development capability

Choosing a Vendor

NW Council had two main considerations when selecting a new custom software development partner. The first was location – it was important to them to have someone in the area, who would be available in the same time zone for planned and unplanned meetings and coordination. The other was experience with sizable content management systems. Parthenon has built, optimized and maintained several different types of CMS for a wide range of clients, and we were able to demonstrate our ability to not only support the group’s needs, but do so in a way that would complement their in-house needs for drafting and publishing documents frequently.

Our Solution

Since the previous UI/UX was already approved by NW Council, we had the advantage of being able to compare our version to the existing CMS. We demoed a version of their site front page in DjangoCMS to the client, who liked the flexibility of the plugin system. CMSes are on a spectrum that range from a glorified rich text editor (stock Wordpress, Mezzanine) to a form-based data entry system with user-defined content types (Craft, Expression Engine). DjangoCMS fits in the middle of that; content managers can add rich text at any point on a page, and experienced admins can add snippets of code at will, but it’s also very easy to make plugins that correspond to a strict format and can be dropped into a page by less experienced content editors.

Most stock CMS fulltext search solutions aren’t the most robust, but on a site with this much data, we needed a bulletproof solution. To accomplish this, we integrated ElasticSearch for faceted search across pages, documents, blog posts, measures, and decisions.

Six fully custom Django modules were built. As is typical of our Django projects, the framework’s app structure allowed for significant customization without causing conflicts with the main site architecture. To let content editors easily put together a page made out of approved components, we made over 35 custom CMS plugins during the project. Some of these allowed content editors to quickly put together a page that matched the client’s branding and high-level design, while others did heavier lifting, assembling data, documents, and calendars of upcoming meetings.

To handle the migration, we also wrote a script that transformed the Drupal Content to DjangoCMS objects, and also moved uploaded visual assets while generating new thumbnails.

Results

We ended up with a pixel-perfect version of the original site, in DjangoCMS. The site currently serves two public-facing sites with completely different branding, simultaneously and without code duplication; supports heavy document workflows; and has a robust plugin architecture, enabling editors to build pages visually with drag-and-drop components. The client has continued working with Parthenon for ongoing maintenance and feature development for over 4 years.