A Drupal Migration and Responsive Design for Canada’s Island Province

Evolving Web designed and built the new Prince Edward Island website, providing the digital ‘front door’ to provincial government services. We migrated over 100,000 bilingual pages to the latest version of Drupal. The new website reflects the brand and establishes the website as a primary source of information for residents, visitors, and businesses in PEI. It also serves the needs of elected officials, non-profit organizations, and other stakeholders looking for services and resources. The project included a redesign to align the new website with accessibility and responsive design best practices. We simplified the content publishing process with a consolidated workflow that removes friction to add and update content.

The Digital Web Office of the Government of PEI is operating the digital “Front Door” to the government information and services in PEI. Prince Edward Island is the smallest Canadian province with an estimated population of 170,000 with the capital in Charlottetown. It is renowned for its natural beauty, historic sights, and culinary culture.

The Government of Prince Edward Island (PEI) needed to upgrade their website in advance of the end-of-support for Drupal 7 in 2025. Therefore, the project goal was to create a new Drupal 10 website experience that reflects the brand and maintains the website as a primary source of information for residents, as well as visitors, businesses, government officials, and other stakeholders. As part of the platform update, PEI wanted to improve the search functionality for essential queries. This Drupal migration was an opportunity to update the visuals for current accessibility and UX/UI standards and better align with the Government of PEI brand.

The previous version of the PEI website included solutions that made an automated migration challenging. This included custom code and complex configuration in creating landing pages. Modules such as Panels were used, which had been retired and thus required an alternative solution. 

The client was also using the Web Experience Toolkit, which is a version of Drupal that has a lot of interdependencies with other modules and introduced a lot of content types, not all of which were in use. This meant that Evolving Web needed to do more technical analysis in discovery to develop the final architecture.

Initially, there was no mandate to include a full redesign. However, after some design benchmarking in the Discovery phase, the design goals were clarified, and the project was rescoped to accommodate a design update.
 

Evolving Web migrated the Government of Prince Edward Island website to the latest version of Drupal. We worked with the Digital Web Office of PEI to identify the functionality that needed to be preserved and that which could be updated. We mapped out improved content processes for the small team to build engaging content.

Our work included: 

• Migrating 100,000+ bilingual pages from Drupal 7 to the latest version of Drupal:
  • Substituting the D7 Panels module with modern Layout Builder module 
     
  • Exchanging the internal API for newsletter subscriptions with the open source Simplenews module
• Introducing the Node Authorize Link module, for the content managers not to have to log into the website to review content
• Modernizing the website’s design with improved homepage UX and simplified structure for increased accessibility and adaptability
• Aligning the new website with the Government of Prince Edward Island’s brand guidelines with striking landscape visuals to reflect the natural beauty of the coast
• Simplifying content pages, and added easy-to-use components to help content editors build engaging content compliant with WCAG A guidelines
• Modernizing the Apache Solr 4 to Apache Solr 8-based search function that prioritizes the relevant content
• Replacing their old staging website used to manage/approve content with a modern content publishing workflow
• Training for the content team based on the newly simplified publishing process

The migration to the latest version of Drupal and the design update resulted in a modernized website for Prince Edward Island that speaks to the needs of its users. The new design creates a better rhythm of images and text, improving the use of whitespace and leading visitors to relevant information more quickly. For the content editors, we streamlined  the content publishing process with a consolidated workflow that removes friction to add and update content. We’ve simplified the maintenance by reducing dependencies on custom code and increased compliance with accessibility and security standards.