Princeton University Press

Background

Princeton University Press (PUP) is an independent publisher with close formal and informal connections to Princeton University. It was founded in 1905 and has brought over 10,000 scholarly books to print, including the works of Albert Einstein. Six of their books have received Pulitzer Prizes. PUP’s mission is to disseminate scholarship through print and digital media, within both academia and society at large.

The PUP website was first created in the 1990s and was retrofitted to add functionality over the years, resulting in a number of disparate moving parts. The website grew to include over 100,000 static and generated HTML pages, containing various pieces of information and images, mini sites, a WordPress blog, a newsletter and some basic commerce functionality for North America and Europe/Asia/Africa.

Goals

Migrating the site’s legacy data and creating an improved, responsive user experience were key to the project’s success. Working with the press’s web team, including their database architect and the director of web development, Evolving Web’s technical team performed a preliminary website audit and created a prioritized requirements and functionality list to define the following goals:

Migrate a large amount of legacy content into a new Drupal 8 installation
Eliminate the use of different platforms and online methods to handle various legacy functionalities
Improve the user experience
Provide a format for displaying pages and online purchasing that is familiar and intuitive for website visitors
Improve accessibility
Allow for online purchasing from their two separate global markets
Provide robust search capabilities, allowing visitors to effectively find publications
Create a solution that allows PUP’s staff to effectively use the new platform
Work collaboratively to reduce client-initiated scope creep

Challenges

The press’s previous website had been created in a piecemeal manner by a former employee, where custom scripts pulled data from the press’s custom database, to build static HTML pages. Evolving Web needed to be able to access the database to create the migrations, and then pull that content into Drupal. The complexity of the migration was the largest challenge, with the huge volume of existing elements adding to the complexity.

Specifically, the technical challenges included the following:

Performing a complex migration of 8,000+ books and 4,000+ jpgs
Identifying and removing out-of-print books and their associated elements
Recreating a large number of static HTML pages (100,000 static and generated pages)
Developing a consistent way to display 10,000 different book templates
Building a custom module to assist with migration challenges
Addressing legacy complexity
Creating fields to import the large number (36) of unique imported book fields
Managing cron migrations on Pantheon
Dealing with the complexity of the legacy code base
Providing an editor workflow solution

Solution

Analysis of the legacy database, scripts and website
Complete content audit and analysis, defining required fields and obsolete material
Move the records (information on the static HTML pages) to Drupal 8, to organize and streamline content
Update layout and functionality to a responsive design with a clean layout, simplified menu, streamlined search and improved shopping experience
Synchronize data from central system and migrate it into Drupal
Deploy to a managed hosting environment
Train staff as editors on the new Drupal solution so they are able to revise existing content and produce new publication listings, allowing for continual site improvement and expansion
Provide tools and guidelines to assist staff with developing a successful content strategy

A collage of screenshots and images

Results

The homepage refresh used the existing branding to produce a modern look-and-feel for the website. It utilizes a standard responsive template to adapt the site to desktop computers and mobile devices. The new user interface includes a minimal drop-down main menu, a clean and accessible footer, and a search box that collapses.

The complex migration of ~8,000 books and ~4,000 jpgs was successful. Migration continues with a process that is optimized to prevent downtime / inconsistency on the live site. Migrations can be run manually or automatically at night, and out-of-print books are systematically removed from the database.

The Bootstrap-based design has improved SEO while conforming to accessibility standards. And it is easy for content editors to update web content using WYSIWYG while images are auto-resized, providing visual consistency for the brand.

The previous website regenerated 50,000 pages for even a small tweak to a template or change in functionality. Under the new system, an automatic nightly process synchronizes the content to the Drupal database, with all other changes to pages propagating instantly. The result is significant speed improvements for iterations on website functionality, making it easier to apply bug fixes.

Why Drupal?

Drupal is an open-source platform that has been widely adopted by the Princeton University community
Drupal is a single platform that can handle different functionalities, integrating multiple technologies. One platform can do it all. And using Drupal means new functionality will be available or can be created when needed
The Drupal CMS enables a robust content migration and a synchronization framework
With just a few hours of training, multiple site editors and contributors can use Drupal 8’s workflow system to systematically and easily add approved content to the website
Drupal is a stable, secure and maintainable platform

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