We’re excited to announce the new NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing website, which launched at the beginning of September, just in time for fall semester. The new site is a complete rethink and rework of their original Drupal 6 site—complete with a fresh design, improved content model, and Drupal 8 site build.
Four Kitchens began the site build in April 2016 reviewing wireframes and comps provided by NYU’s design partner Hello Pilgrim. Work began quickly, developing the content model and building out the content types. Given the end-of-summer deadline and the fact that there wouldn’t be a migration, a priority was placed on getting the site ready for content entry as early as possible for the client’s editors.
The experience of developing on Drupal 8 was pretty new to everyone on the the project team and provided some opportunities for retooling our development process. Work was done to get our Aquifer build tool working with D8’s Composer-based workflow. On the frontend, Drupal’s Twig templating allowed us to experiment with a component-based theming approach using Pattern Lab. We fell in love with Paragraphs and YAML Form to provide adaptable content entry patterns and data capture for the client. We also really enjoyed working with D8’s object-oriented architecture when creating custom modules for syncing user, academic program, and research publication data from various sources with the content in Drupal.
Engineering and development specifics
- Drupal 8
- Pattern Lab for living style guide and component-based Drupal theme
- Aquifer build tool
- CircleCI for build testing, code sniffing, and deployment
- custom data syncing with client faculty/staff database, PubMed and Crossref publication metadata, and NYU’s student information system
- hosted on Acquia
The Four Kitchens team was led by Chris Devidal (Project Manager and Product Owner), with Jeff Tomlinson (Technical Lead and backend engineering), Evan Willhite (frontend engineering), and Brian Lewis (site building and frontend development). Also thanks to David Diers and Allan Chappell for additional code review support. The team from NYU included David Resto (NYU systems integration and general wrangling), Keith Olsen (content specialist), and Hershy Korik (backend development). Mike Kelly, from Hello Pilgrim, worked on the sitemap, wireframes, and graphic design.
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