Oxfam International
We’re proud to have been working with Oxfam International for many years, initially on their GROW campaign and then on the redevelopment of their main Oxfam.org website on Drupal 7 – including a major migration of content from their old CMS – a site that we subsequently supported, maintained, and continuously improved in line with Oxfam's strategic objectives.
In 2019 Oxfam International commissioned Agile Collective to deliver the next stage in the evolution of their website; a more complex multilingual migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, to take advantage of Drupal 8’s superior performance, security, multilingual support, and editorial experience
Working as one team
Having assessed the technical feasibility and cost implications of the upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8, we put together a project team comprising design, development and project management resource from both Agile Collective and Oxfam International to deliver a multilingual migration to Drupal 8, front-end development, creation of a reusable pattern library, and the redevelopment of various custom features such as the Oxfam International donations system.
Tackling complexity
This migration presented some specific technical challenges that we needed to address. Firstly, the Oxfam International site is multilingual, supporting English, French and Spanish. Secondly, the new site required the processing and transformation of content into a new structure, not just the migration.
Custom migrations are well-documented, and out-of-the-box multilingual migrations are well-supported. However, the combination of the two presented a wider list of unknowns. Having identified this as the main area of uncertainty, we decided to tackle this early in the migration process so we could identify any issues early and address them.
Design and front-end development
Rather than work from a set of ‘complete’ page mockups created prior to development, we worked closely with Oxfam International’s designer to approach the design of the new site at an atomic, component-based level. With a shared vocabulary and understanding of UX, design and front-end development, this approach worked really well.
Main image (top): Bennett Tobias on Unsplash