Goals
Manage and deliver content with Drupal 8
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) is a research and policy institute focused on advancing federal and state policies that help low-income Americans. CBPP previously relied on Fíonta for ongoing enhancements and maintenance of its content-rich Drupal 7 site, as well as support of the organization’s Salesforce instance.
In 2019, we began working with CBPP to plan a site migration to Drupal 8. CBPP planned to migrate the site largely as-is, without a major rebranding or redesign effort. Our discovery phase focused on uncovering areas for improving and simplifying build and functionality. An easy eventual upgrade path to Drupal 9 was also top of mind.

Challenges
Migrate from Drupal 7 and plan for Drupal 9
- Identifying all the major features of the current site and evaluating whether each should be rebuilt in Drupal 8 or abandoned.
- Auditing existing content to streamline the content migration plan.
- Prioritizing accessibility for the D8 build.
- Evaluating the existing hosting configuration and requirements to identify a robust and secure platform for the new site.
- Reviewing the site map and information architecture to ensure intuitive navigation on the new site.

Solutions
Organized and streamlined content structure for improved user experience
The site implementation kicked off in July 2020 and the site launched in February 2021. Throughout the project CBPP’s in-house developer was integrated with Fíonta’s development team, allowing CBPP to take on specific tasks to reduce costs. Jira was used to track progress on component building and Slack to maintain open communication among the development team, including CBPP’s developer. Highlights of the implementation include:
- Creation of standardized Docker-based local development environments for Fíonta and CBPP developers using the lando toolkit.
- Site hosting on Pantheon, including Apache Solr implementation with faceted browsing.
- Configuration of any media-rich content types, all with multiple view modes, crosscut by taxonomy and displayed contextually.
- Landing and topic breakdown pages built with a heavily customized Layout Builder setup.
- Migration of more than 11K nodes from 10 source content types into 8 destination types, after identifying content types that could be consolidated.
- Migration of media from D7 Scald to D8 Media Entities. (If this is of specific interest, please check out our blog post on the subject!)
- Mailchimp integration for multiple newsletter subscriptions.
Our collaboration also served as functional training for the CBPP web staff, enabling them to confidently hit the ground running with their new site. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ upgraded site now offers improved functionality and accessibility on a robust, secure hosting platform, and will be easily upgraded to Drupal 9 when the time comes.
