Almost 10 months since being first approached by the European Mathematical Society to update their Drupal (version 5) website, the new Drupal 7 version was quietly launched this weekend. This was a massive undertaking, as the Drupal 5 site had little structure and multiple security vulnerabilities, and essentially required a complete redesign.
Migration
There were over 5000 nodes to migrate - mostly 'basic page' content types, and use was made of the Drupal Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal migration modules to move into a Drupal 7 format, as well as analysis and structure certain elements into a more structured format.
Theme
A responsive theme was developed based on the Gratis theme. Use was made of media queries to stack or collapse elements as the screen width reduced, but also Responsive Tables was used to render table data in a pragmatic way according to the screen real estate.
Features
- All content submissions pass through a moderation workflow, facilitated by Workbench Moderation. There is also a user-driven system to flag up inappropriate content.
- Geographical data now structured (using Geofield and Addressfield), to allow jobs, corporate members etc to be overlaid onto maps.
- Rich WYSIWYG interface that also allows directly LaTeX input and MathML export. This was achieved by customisation of CKEditor and use of the MathJax add on.
- Full user account profiles, with optional links to Twitter.
- Use of Picture to provide adaptive images according to the screen size: this is important to reduce page size and bandwidth overhead on mobile devices.
- Integration with online submissions and membership payment, with use of Drupal Commerce and use of a custom payment gateway.
- Organic Groups allow the EMS Committees to build sub-websites within the EMS website; certain pages can be made private to members only. This provides the EMS with an extranet embedded within the website.
- Discussion forum now available to logged in users.
- EMS administrators have management dashboards, including a comprehensive system to manage the site's home page, including the masthead banners and adverts.
Go ahead and view the updated site at http://www.euro-math-soc.eu/