MRC/BHF CoRE in Advanced Cardiac Therapies (REACT)
Introduction
The University of Edinburgh approached us with a proposal for a new web site based around the rebuilding of injured hearts and to regulate cardiac regeneration. We’ve worked with the university on other research based projects in the past, including https://www.eurogct.org and https://www.eurostemcell.org (both of which are multilingual) which encompass subjects that can truly change the world we live in for the better.
The new ‘REACT’ web site would provide information in the form of research, news and opportunities, presented in an easy to navigate manner and fully accessible.
The Strategy
Our client had a clear vision of how the web site would look and work, with distinctive site sections and ways to relate content between these areas. Drupal 11 was selected as the platform to use, allowing us to capitlise on features built into Drupal Core and common contributed modules, maximizing their potential to deliver an easy to navigate site structure. The client was already familiar with using Drupal and was keen to use it for this project, knowing the strengths it offers in site structure, management and future expansion.
The Solution Like with many of our Drupal web site builds, the contributed module “Paragraphs” is at the heart of providing a way for administrators to make use of re-usable content templates.
Content is delegated to different areas of the site through the use of tagging using Drupal’s taxonomy. Listing pages make use of the search api module and solr to cater for filtering on taxonomy terms and keywords. “Chained filtering” is a feature, for example articles are tagged with contributors and contributors are in turn assigned to organisations. A chained search filter is created to make it possible to filter articles by organisations via the contributors.
Accessibility is a particular factor we have focused on with this build, bearing in mind things such as colour contrast and page load time. Images for content are uploaded via the CMS backend and the rendered output is scaled, cropped and converted to a web optimised format (webp) automatically so the content editor does not have to worry about making these optimisations themselves.
When it comes to checking for accessibility, one validator is often not the answer, as different validators check against varying accessibility criteria. Some of the standard validators include Wave and W3C, which report no errors for the REACT homepage. Other validators we’ve used include Accessibiliy check which scores of 95% for the REACT homepage.
The Results
- A brand new web site for a new research project
- Robust content management built around Drupal 11
- High scores on accessibility validators
- Framework in place for future expansion of features