Objective
To end the institute’s reliance on the previous custom software and system used by the Publications Library, and integrate it with IIED’s main website, www.iied.org. This was necessary in order to add new features, limit security risks and ensure accurate reporting systems for the institute.
Solution
The existing system, being custom-built and no longer supported, needed to be reverse engineered in order to determine the structure of the data held therein. A new repository architecture and the process for migrating the existing content, consisting of a large relational database and over 7,000 PDF documents, was created in Drupal CMS (v.8).
The new site was built in close consultation with content creators, site editors and end-users, and includes a number of tools designed to aid with cleaning up, managing, searching and browsing the large quantity of data.
Integrations with the institute’s other systems were developed using REST feeds and Drupal-specific migration tools.
The site
n.b. in 2021 the codebase and architecture of this site became the basis for (and its content was eventually merged with), IIED’s main organisational site, in the process of upgrading the latter from Drupal v7 to 9 (now 10), for which Chris was lead developer.