 Hi everyone, I'm Kelly Delaney from the Drupal Association and I'm the Director of Development and this is my co-host. Hi there folks, I'm Nathan Roach, the Marketing Director at Accelerant. This is Beyond the Build, Stories of Drupal Impact, where we'll be highlighting incredible Drupal use cases by ambitious site builders and end users, just like we have on today. Great Kelly, who are we speaking with today? We have a longtime Drupal partner called Anartek out of Ireland and their client, University of Limerick. Great, let's welcome them in. Hey Mark and Bren. Hi. Hey folks. Hey guys. How you doing? Thanks so much for joining us. Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves, what you do at your organizations? Mark, why don't we start with you? Sure, yeah. My name is Mark. I've got the same job title as Kelly, Director of Development, except at Anartek instead of the Drupal Association. In Anartek, the company kind of has three departments. So we've got department of kind of development or projects, support and managed services and then business development and account management. So I lead the development part basically, any kind of new websites being built or kind of very large projects for current clients. I take the lead on those. Much more front-end developer than back-end developer with a history as an English teacher. Most people in Anartek and most people I know in Drupal don't have histories in computer science or software development and things like that. Great. Awesome. And Bren, how about yourself? Hi folks. So yeah, I'm the web manager at the University of Limerick, which is a university in the southwest of Ireland. I run a web team there and we based the, are responsible for maintaining most of the web presence, the corporate website and ancillary sites around that. So that's kind of our role. We're kind of split among UX people, content people and development. My background, I was actually a developer myself and started using Drupal around about Drupal 6, but I've since kind of moved into the management side of things. So I'm a lapsed developer, I would say. Great. Could you tell us a little bit about the relationship between the University of Limerick and Anartek? How did this all get started? Well, I guess for myself there was a personal relationship with Anartek because I used to work for many years in the UK, but then I moved back to Ireland and I actually worked with Anartek for 18 months before I took up my position at the University of Limerick. So I was a project manager for Anartek and I got to see the company from the inside out and had a great time and I still kept good relationships with the companies. And then when I moved to the University of Limerick, it was already using Drupal, so my experience in Drupal kind of dovetailed with that as well. So you had mentioned that the relationship between the University of Limerick and Drupal predates you, right? Far before. Do you know about how Drupal was selected or anything about why Drupal is the product of choice or platform of choice for the University? Yeah. So I think, I mean, it does predate me, but I think it was first introduced around 2012, I think. And I think there was a process, an evaluation process at that point around technologies that the University might use. And Drupal came out on the top of that list, I guess. But it was kind of, there was no real central governance of web creation at the University at the time. So it was a recommended technology that people could go and get an agency to build a site for them. But there was no kind of coherent control over that development at the time, which led to a proliferation of sites, really. And then I joined in 2018 to manage the central web team that would put some sort of governance around the creation of sites because it had spiralled up to hundreds and with no governance and no consistency across them. And Drupal is very flexible and many different agencies built the site and they built many different things. So we needed to kind of try and rationalize that build. Still, but Drupal is our preferred technology, obviously, but to put some control on what was happening. You had mentioned that this was a big migration project when you started working with Mark just recently. So you had said it kind of started as an emergency. You had some compliance and accessibility issues that made you need to migrate from Drupal 7 to 9. Could you tell us about that? Sure. So as I said, when the web team was first created in 2018, we became this central unit for governance of the web. And the first thing we did was we created a central platform, a Drupal 7 platform, and we tried to migrate as many of these isolated Drupal instances as we could in there, kind of prioritizing the higher value sites that would be of value to our users. And over time, this was a Drupal 7 build, we migrated about 50 sites into that. But it was kind of, it was still kind of an older build and kind of not an ideal solution, but at least it gave us some kind of central governance and homogeneity around what we were doing and consistency of presentation. But one of the difficulties it had was that authors still had a large degree of freedom of what they could add to the site. And what we found was we found proliferation of cookies in particular. People were embedding all sorts of things that the system wasn't really catering for, things like Google Maps, which would set cookies. And also there was no real accessibility built into the platform. And in the last few years, certainly in Ireland, both the regulators around cookies and around accessibility have really emphasized the need for compliance. And we came to a situation where we got compliant, especially on cookies, and then because of the diverse nature, and it was actually a site that hadn't been migrated yet, we went out of compliance and we got a notification that we had two weeks to get back into compliance, which we did, but at that point we realized that this was not sustainable and we really, really needed to upgrade our platform. Drupal 7 was at that time going to be end of life anyway in 2022 and that changed after. So we initiated a kind of an emergency procedure to get ourselves onto Drupal 9 and to build in compliance for cookies and accessibility as much as we possibly could into that platform. And that's what we did. Brent, two weeks or what? What would happen in two weeks? I think the technical term is enforcement. You can be fined basically, is what it boils down to. And they have, I mean the regulators have fined, I mean we saw today that Meta by the Irish regulators got 1.2 billion of a fine around GDPR. It's the same regulator and the Data Protection Commissioner. But yeah, I mean they really just emphasized that we have a legal requirement to be compliant with this stuff and we needed to make sure that we were adhering. Now, by and large we had been compliant. It was just that there was a kind of an ancillary site that had been picked up that wasn't compliant. So yeah, but it did highlight the fact that we couldn't continue with this diverse ecosystem and we also needed to upgrade the central platform. So there was kind of two birds we wanted to kill with one stone really. I mean anybody who works in the higher education sector this won't be an unfamiliar landscape to them. Most of the people I've talked to in Ireland and the UK and abroad have this ecosystem of hundreds of sites that have built up and a lot of people are struggling trying to maintain that, maintain compliance, maintain governance over that. So it's a common problem I think. Yeah Mark, have you seen that other places too? I think you mentioned another higher ed college and what was also the first thing that you did when you came in and you heard that? Was that like hurry up and do a million things at once? You came in under the gun. Well, yeah, there's a slight part of the story with Brent. The emergency fix for the cookies was really kind of a two week last minute job. I remember Brent was the director of Managing Director here in Anurtec and I had written a suite of modules for GDPR for Anurtec that we can roll out across all of our clients and it was very helpful let's say. When Brent was chatting with Stella, we thought, yeah, we can get this fixed but we kind of had until Monday or something to get it fixed and we started on because of Thursday evening. So I must have said I had a pretty cool weekend that weekend. We got it done. I think Brent and UL were pretty happy with the speed we could work and that we were willing to kind of take some time out of private lives and make sure that they didn't get kind of hammered by the DPO. In fairness, I think that the Data Protection Commission, I think they're fairly decent. I know they can give you a fine of 20 million or 4% of your turnover, whichever is the larger, but I think they would work with you and give you a notice first and a warning next to that. But yeah, that was the first thing was get all the cookies and it was really hard actually to find them because you're looking at a couple of hundred Drupal websites you think but there's also some WordPress ones and there was also some Joomla ones and there was some custom builds and we found a WordPress website inside a Drupal website at one stage and some of the websites we just couldn't get access to parts of the code base because there were an external agency who would maybe not work anymore or whatever like that. So there was a lot of kind of digging around through... The job itself wasn't very hard but there was thousands of bits to the job to get it finished. That sounds like an Easter egg hunt. How do you tackle that? What do you start with? You have multiple sites and using different CMSs. How do you begin? From my point of view, I let Brendan speak about how maybe they diagnosed issues themselves. From our point of view, I had written a module called ANRT that's our short name for Anartec, ANRT GDPR and that had some custom templates around YouTube and cookie controls software like CookieBot or OneTrust and those kind of things. So we had rolled that out to about 70 different websites in Anartec and I had done that in maybe a month or so. So I was fairly confident that I understand kind of cookies at scale. Let's call it. So from my point of view, I could very easily isolate YouTube templates and Vimeo templates, SoundCloud templates where something might get added via a Facebook tracking cookie or tracking pixel or something rather than an iFrame with some JavaScript that this pulls in externally and things like that. I think Brendan kind of got it at the right time. If he had asked us through this, before we had had the Anartec GDPR internal project, it could have been a two-month project but since we've done so much work for 70 other clients, we kind of piggybacked on all that knowledge. Yeah, and from our side, I mean, it was a tremendous amount of work to get back into compliance but it also highlighted that this was just merely a sticky plaster on the existing system and it really... I mean, we always had plans to upgrade anyway because obviously Drupal 7 was a technology that's ending its life but it really cemented for us that we could slip out of compliance despite all the work that had been done because of the way that the systems were put together and built, we could slip out of compliance very easily again and not realize it. So we put a bit more governance around our cookie management processes but we still, then at that point said, we really need to rebuild the system here, build a clean system, bring content into it that we can control how people create that content and it's not about controlling them or forcing them to do things, to assist them into being compliant without them having to think about it really. So that sticky plaster exercise really cemented our need to straightaway build a new system basically and migrate content into that. So after this emergency happened, then did you and your team, Brent, go to the drawing board and decide, yes, we need to contact an agency? Did you go through a selection process or did you know you wanted to go right back to Intertech? Yeah. No, we went through a selection process. So we're a public body, so we have to... we can't just appoint people. We have to go through a whole process around that. It's called procurement. In this case, it was a much quicker process. We did kind of a very abbreviate procurement process but we still did. We contacted multiple companies. They had to submit proposals and then a panel evaluated those proposals. And I actually didn't sit on that panel because I had worked for Anurtex. I didn't want to have any association with it. So that panel evaluated them and Anurtex came out as a clear winner. So that's how they got appointed. So where are you in the process, Mark? So you're doing this large migration. I know you have 50 sites that you've migrated to Drupal 9. Are you still in the middle of this, of all the updates? No, that part is finished. So there was a couple of platforms. Brent can correct me if I'm wrong about it. There was a couple of platforms. So one was they migrated about 50 websites into this central platform. But there were still 50 individual installations of Drupal, let's say. And then there's another platform that's a multi-site which has maybe 35 or 40 installations. And then there's what I might call the Wild West which is the rest of the websites that are kind of outside of both of these areas. So phase one was to migrate those 50 websites into one Drupal installation. So now when you want to update a module or there's a security release for Drupal, you don't have to update 50 different websites. We update one website and that carries out across the board. Yeah, from our side, yeah. The initial migration project was that central system that we had kind of standardized on and we had about 50 sites on that. And I think the numbers, I have the numbers here in front of me, I think there was 60,000 nodes, 70 content types, 95 paragraph types, 60 vocabularies, 37,000 individual migration processes. That's the numbers of what it took to migrate that central system. But then we had about another 120 odd sites, 70 of which actually were in one system and a Drupal 7 multi-site system which was built in by an agency way back in the days and it didn't use any of the Drupal 7 inbuilt multi-site ways of building a site. They did something very strange and bespoke. But yeah, so since that central system that Antarctic built for us has been built and it was completed, I think, start of the year, we've been migrating more and more sites into that. So our numbers are down now of the 70 sites on that other multi-site. I think we've only got about 15 left to migrate in. And I think we've only got about another 20, maybe other sites to come in. So we've really pushed to migrate content in but the new system wasn't just about creating a Drupal 9 site that was compliant. We also added new editor tools on top of that that's made migrating that content much easier. And I guess Mark can talk about that. We're using Layout Builder first previously. We were using paragraphs. So the actual migration process for our content editors, they find it much quicker to add content in now. And we're still not completed that migration process but we're a long way down the line on it now. So it's not automated creation anymore as it was in the migration process. It's manual taking an old site, bringing the content across, evaluating the content, bringing it across. But it's proving very rapid now with the new system that we're very pleased with. The ease of content editor experience, Brent, it's not, I suppose, specifically just because we use Layout Builder rather than paragraphs because if we had created 90 layout blocks, it's still the same issue with 90 kind of paragraph types. But there was a huge rationalization process that went on there as well that things had kind of grown organically in that if somebody had an image paragraph type and then somebody else said, but I want to have text beside my image. Well, then somebody created another image paragraph type and somebody else said, I want to have my image be clickable as a link. So then there was another one which was a linked image paragraph type. So myself and Sean wanted to project managers in Anurtec. We spent I think three weeks or thereabouts full time doing absolutely nothing. And I mean, nothing was really, really boring except looking at what we call the spreadsheet of doom. So the spreadsheet of doom was the 70 content types on one sheet and the 90 paragraph types on another and then a matrix that creates a sheet for every single configuration of these and so we got things that like get back to the image example. There was an image, there was an image with text, there was an image with link, there was an image with something, something, something, something, something, something. So they all became the image block. So now when you create the image block, if you want to link pop in an image and pop in a link, if you want some text beside it, pop in that, if you want it left or right, select the alignment features and things like that. So we would a lot of work with that kind of rationalization of things. So we got down to, I think, from, I don't know, was it 30, 40 content types down to maybe 15, 20 and from 90 paragraph types to maybe 25, 30 block types. And it also, I mean, it changed the architecture of the site as well in that central system because previously it was a multi-site, so we had about 50 sites, but there were their own individual sites with individual databases and the ability to override the theme and add in their own modules and create their own components. And that's why that spread kind of happened over time. But in the new system, it's actually only one site. It's one Drupal site. And they're all using the exact same components, but we use groups to section the site out now. So if you're a member of a group, in a department or a faculty, you can edit content in your own group, but you're using the exact same components as everybody else using the site, which has made the governance much, much easier for us. It's also meant that things like compliance being built in is much, much easier. It's simpler. You're not having to be compliant across 95 different block types or paragraph types. You've got the same blocks and components for everybody. So, yeah, it's really made things much better. I think, Bren... What have you heard? Yeah. Sorry, okay. Just following on with my friends. There was a kind of a sea change, I think, internally for you guys as well, that in terms of the governance, because it was so easy for anybody in the Department of Economics to say, I want a new call to action. And somebody else could say, no, you can't have that. But of course we can. That's our own website. Whereas now you must justify the new feature you want to be available across every single website in this whole web setup. And if you can't justify it for everybody, are you sure that we really need it on this one website? And it's become, I think from the management point of view, and I don't want to speak for you, let's say, but from the management point of view, it's easier to say no now. And it's easier to have an overarching kind of content strategy around that. That was much, much more difficult in the other setup. Exactly. And it has an interesting kind of knock-on effect then that because all our editors, so basically we have a central web team that does kind of certain amount of content, but we're such a big organization that we have distributed editors in their own departments and areas, taking care of content relevant to their own area. But because they're all using the same system now and they have the same common problems, it makes it easier for us to diagnose, but it also makes it easier to train them. And it makes it easier for them to cross-communicate with each other. So it's kind of a community of editors now as opposed to before because they might be using similar but slightly different components. There was no commonality really. So as well as the website being common now, the methods of creation and the training and the documentation is all unified. Kelly, you had something you wanted to ask? No. But he answered it. So you're talking about centralizing digital experiences, not just from the development point of view, but also from the content publishing point of view as well, with one centralized strategy and a means of ensuring that that is compliant, not just in terms of regulation, but also in terms of what the University of Limerick is looking to do with their platform. Why Drupal? Were there alternatives? Were there discussions? How in the end was it decided we're going from D7, we're going to D9, and we're staying with Drupal? Sure. I mean, there's a few drivers in that. One of the obvious ones is that Drupal is a technology that we've been using since 2012. We know it. We trust it. We have experience in it. We have not just experience in using it, but we have got certain amount of development capacity ourselves around it. But the fundamental thing with Drupal for us is its flexibility. Drupal is tremendously flexible. We would have a number of back-end systems, for example, we would like to integrate with. And if we were going with a bespoke system, we don't know if we would have the flexibility to integrate with those. But we can do that with Drupal, and we can do it ourselves reasonably easily if we know the technologies. And yeah, we need that flexibility. Obviously, Drupal is open source as well, and we're a university. We like the fundamental philosophy of open source. It kind of aligns with our goals and our view of the world. So that's very important for us. And things like the Open Web and things like that, Drupal is a great contributor to that. And yeah, so really it's a technology that we trust, that we believe in, and that gives us the things that we need. And that's why we continue to stay with it. Mark, any thoughts on that? From our point of view, it was a no-brainer to use Drupal. Well, I mean, the tender document that stipulated they needed Drupal anyway. So in that case, but in any case we would have used Drupal for something like this specifically because of the content modeling capabilities. Within the university you've got fairly complex setup in terms of departments and sub-departments and staff and the marketing kind of ancillary, not just teaching areas, marketing staff and things like that. The data model that goes with that in terms of tagging content, that one piece of content can lie in more than one section of the website. That's pretty complex and that's hard to do in something like WordPress or hard to do in if you're going to write your own as some sort of a JavaScript front-end or using something sanity or that that would be very difficult. So for us it was really the content modeling experience, the ability to create content types, the ability to how taxonomy works in Drupal for categorizing stuff the group module then was the killer selling point for us. You get a lot of a lot of websites where you might have a lot of editors and some editors are news editors so they can only edit news posts and somebody is an event editor and they can edit the event section. When it comes to university you've got news posts inside departments so you've got a news editor which you wanted to only edit news inside the department of business or only edit news inside the sports science department so the group module allowed us to do that that you could section off as part of the website so if someone could get they could be an administrator on one website in UL and there might only be a visitor on another website and there could be an editor on a different website and to be able to do all that and do that for free let's say as a free open source product that's amazing, get ready to pay a couple of million euros for someone to write a custom feature set for you to do that. Even just the group module part of it it was like this one aspect that was yeah it's already open source, it's already there, you didn't have to pay for it and it just made the world of difference with this instance. Yeah, because if you look at the old UL website and there's the science and engineering department and then there's the business department and then there's the global we'll say the main website there's news that could be posted from the main website inside one of those departments as well but since they're all individual Drupal installations they've all got their own URLs, you've got three different URLs and that's pretty tricky to handle three different URLs for the same piece of content inside one website on its own but something like group module allows us to create the news in one place and add it to this group and add it to this group and add it to this group and each individual group then becomes its own individual website inside UL it's very very simple, it might sound like like oh wow that's very complex, it's really simple to do in Drupal Cool well tell us about how's the project going now where are you almost done with it, are you still in the middle of migrating or what's happening So the project itself, so the platform is built and we're constantly improving it and looking for ways to make it better but so we're still migrating content and that will continue through the summer we're hoping to finish, I mean the deadline is November 2023 because that's the end of Life Drupal 7 we're hoping to finish before then but we'll see we're pushing towards that and then I guess for us then a lot of it is around then seeing was it successful you know because we had certain goals at the start of the project and we're quite happy that the project has fulfilled those goals for us we're compliant in terms of cookies so far we haven't dropped out of compliance yet, we keep monitoring that our accessibility of the site is really really good there's a technology called Silk Tide which is one of the accessibility tools you can have they have various links running where you can monitor sectors and then monitor the Irish University sector and we're currently the number one site for accessibility on that site and that's for the new site now we still have some of the older sites that are not accessible but once they're migrated in we'll get all the benefits in the new site so I mean once our migrations are complete we're very happy that the platform has given us what we've asked for it really can you tell us a little bit about moving from paragraphs to layout builder you mentioned about a hundred paragraph types to about 20 block types could you speak a bit about that who was you oh I should specify why don't we start with you Bren and then Mark you can color in any gaps there is that good okay sure yeah no bother so yeah I mean for me I mean I don't do much content editing now I'm not the target audience for the interface but so paragraphs were great to be fair you know they served us well but the interface for adding paragraphs isn't very visual you get a kind of a set of fields really that you can see what's been added to the paragraph but it's not very visual whereas with layout builder it's a very visual way of creating content you can create sections you can create a number of columns in a section for example and then you can position blocks in drag and drop them around the place and kind of get a preview of what your web page is going to look like which you didn't get with paragraphs so that's really good for our editors because you know I mean while some of us will have a lot of droop experience a lot of the editors won't they're just using a web interface they don't understand the technology behind that all they know is that they want to their web page look a certain way so one of the kind of drivers as well for us is to try and make our editors lives as easy as possible and having a very visual representation of how they create their content and to allow them to create really you can create really quite complex layouts in terms of regions and columns and different numbers of columns and regions they can do that pretty easily with layout builder and it also gives us as the kind of central team a certain amount of control as well to stop them doing things that we might necessarily want them to do so it allows to create a kind of a flexible platform that's regulated I would say and yeah whereas with paragraphs we didn't really get that in our own system Mark probably would have a more technical answer than that I do actually a lot of the websites we build are pretty complex in AnarTech and what we find with something like paragraphs was if there's four items in play at the same time it gets very very hard to do so if the website is multilingual and you need revisions for your pages and oh god I had a second go there multilingual plus revisions plus nested paragraphs so you know a paragraph container and then items inside it plus one other thing and if those four things align together it's really really difficult when we use layout builder since it's built in to Drupal Core all of those problems were solved we didn't have those issues because it gets the full test suite that Drupal Core has and it's so it's much better tested for does it work with core revisions does it work with multilingual does it work with oh that was workflows scheduling as well when we didn't work with layout builder in that case it was very very tricky and we ended up using kind of hacks to get around things like inline entity form so things weren't actually nested to their own custom I don't get the technical custom entities but we had to do that with a lot of extra patches we even went to one of our clients and told them here based on what we've done with UL your experience is going to be ten times better if you and it wasn't a huge mission for us to change and migrate their stuff back into the kind of UL approach so yeah with an Android tech we're doing our best to use as much Drupal Core as possible rather than the control modules that come into the ecosystem Mark that's a great way to kind of bring it all back like all the stuff you do with Drupal all the other projects how do you think all that background knowledge brought value to this project with University of Limerick I hope it brought a lot the amount of country modules on the University of Limerick website is pretty small at the moment like you're talking maybe 15 or 20 maybe they're about country modules when we started the project there was maybe 70, 90, 100 country modules so we've really worked hard to build things with Drupal Core itself and its core features and the test suite that comes with that I think when you get developers maybe not as experienced as AnarTech you would look at going oh there's a module for that so let's just plug it in and let's just plug it in which is fine and it gets all the things you want done but it can start slowing down your site and it can bring in compliance issues and it can bring scalability issues trying to keep the core as small as possible and then work at the team there is how we would do a lot of our work Awesome Brian do you have anything to add to that to wrap up well I think it kind of goes back again talking about adding in country modules when people come and ask us for stuff that we could kind of solve by putting in a country module we always have to think that it's not just affecting that person who's asked us it's affecting the whole site so we really have to evaluate whether that's going to bring benefit to everybody what's the negative things it might have around performance or an extra layer of maintenance and things like that so we're really quite keen to run a kind of a lean ship really from Drupal from the core and a minimal number of modules without having to introduce any extra complexity now there will be cases where you will need maybe another country module but you need to go into that we need to go into that with our eyes wide open about what it will cost us down the line so we try not to do it Mark, Bren, thank you so much for joining us today we appreciate it thanks for having us folks thanks for being on thank you both folks want to appear on this show what do they do? if you are an agency or an end user that has a Drupal story to share please email us at partnerships at association.drupal.org and join us on Beyond the Build stories of Drupal Impact thanks a lot for joining us today