Drupal Website Build Health Care Without Harm
Leveraging Drupal's Flexibility to Spread a Global Message
Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) is a global leader in transforming health care to reduce its environmental impact. With regional offices in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States, and a global network of partnerships, they had a unique challenge when redesigning their website to accommodate a global audience with specific language and content needs.
Key Solutions
HCWH tasked Aten to take their new website designs and implement a robust web application to serve multiple regions under one Drupal instance. Key solutions included:
Cutting-edge Drupal authoring experience that allows editors to create aesthetically pleasing pages without complicated workflows or hard-to-understand interfaces
Seamless asymmetric translations across all seven sites, serving many users regardless of language
Administrative access managed manually across a sustainable and streamlined approach
Managing Subdomains with Drupal: Streamlining Content Across Regional Sites
Drupal is a great CMS for managing a single site, but handling various requests from multiple domains can be challenging. Logic is needed to route the page request to the appropriate content based on the provided domain, path, and language.
In the case of HCWH, each region represents a domain. For example, both domains might have a page route of “/healthcare”. If this were a standard Drupal site that only served one domain, it would be trivial for the system to respond to the request. Instead, the Drupal application needs to be aware of the current domain you’re viewing and then respond with content associated with only that domain for the given language the user selected.
Thankfully we discovered the Domain module, which was able to handle most of the heavy lifting. This module enabled the development team to set up all the regional domains needed per regional site. On the technical side, the module uses the Node Grants API behind the scenes to control who has access to what content based on the domain the content relates to.
There were a handful of contributed modules that enhanced the Domain ecosystem which were critical in providing a complete solution:
Enhancing Content Editing with Mercury Editor
The client team wanted a way for their authors to easily edit content in various regions of the web application, so we decided to move forward with using the module we built, Mercury Editor, which is built on-top of Paragraphs and Layout Paragraphs architecture.
With this combination, their development team can create multiple paragraphs that manage the data model for each component (also known as paragraph type). Once they had a way to store the component data, we could leverage the Single Directory Component module (which is now a part of Drupal core) to handle encapsulating the front-end styling of each component in a reusable way. Using this type of architecture helped us scale the component library so we could accommodate for the current components we needed to provide, as well as provide a way for the HCWH team to introduce more components in the future if desired.
Once a component library is created, it’s easy to benefit from the Mercury Editor module as it provides a way to insert different components into a section of the page using a drag-and-drop interface.
After several years of planning our site redesign, we evaluated several approaches to content editing before development. As an advocate for our content team, I discovered Mercury Editor, and it stood out immediately. With experience in Drupal, WordPress, and other content management systems, our editors unanimously agreed it was the best choice for our new Drupal site.
Handling Asymmetric Translations with Layout Paragraphs in Drupal
Asymmetric Translations means that each page in a different language can have a unique page structure compared to the source from which the original content was derived. Comprehending the intricate data model of Drupal content nodes adds complexity as we handle numerous fields that may contain entity references that we must track for each translation variation.
The development team’s decision to use Layout Paragraphs, which includes built-in support for asymmetric translation, helps reduce this complexity. By adjusting the configuration to enable translation of the paragraphs field for each content type in Drupal, this HCWH team is able to structure pages differently for each language. This also enables them to remove and choose different components using Mercury Editor.
Streamlining UI Development and User Access
Development with Storybook
In the process of streamlining the development phase to ensure that we met the client’s desired launch date, we decided to utilize Storybook, which allowed us to quickly begin building out the design system components even before having a fully functional Drupal application. This enabled the back-end and front-end developers to work independently and provided a way for the front-end team to focus less on the interworking of the Drupal theming engine and more on the component HTML and JS functionality that were outlined in the design document.
Handling Asymmetric Translations with Layout Paragraphs in Drupal
Managing site administrator user credentials and access manually for a diverse, cross-regional team was proving to be a burden, so they needed a more efficient login flow. We decided to implement a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution that allows all authorized personnel to access the Drupal site using their Google credentials. To implement SSO in our Drupal application, we utilized the Drupal SAML Authentication module, which provides a straightforward way to authenticate users through different identity providers, including Google.
Aten Design Group was a tremendous partner to work with. The professionalism and skill level of everyone who worked on our project were top-notch. Our project manager was amazing managing all the moving parts and his attention to detail is impeccable. The development team were always available, quick to find solutions, and vastly experienced. The best web development experience we have had in a while.
Does your Drupal website redesign have unique and complex needs that require a team of experts to tackle?