Mohawk College, Drupal Upgrade

Mohawk College partnered with Northern to re-platform its proprietary CMS into the latest open-source Drupal CMS.

Improved

global search

Accessibility

compliance

Enhanced

school programs

View Website

Industry

Higher Education

Technology Partners

Drupal

Solutions

Accessibility and Auditing

Content Strategy and Governance

Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Implementation

User Experience (UX) Research and Planning

User Interface (UI) Design

Need to Know

The proprietary CMS that Mohawk was using no longer met its requirements.
After a comprehensive review of CMS in the marketplace, Mohawk decided that Drupal best met its needs.
Northern segmented the Mohawk project into four development sprints focused on delivering Drupal's core functionality.

Client

Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology, located in Hamilton, Canada, offers future-ready certificates, diplomas, degrees, and apprenticeships.

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Brief

Mohawk College sought a Drupal-certified development firm to perform a website audit and recommendations on how to deliver improved site architecture and design, workflow, and content management. The project would entail working with the Mohawk team to assist with migration from the current site to the new site and the ability to provide training, support, and maintenance for implementation.

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Challenge

The proprietary CMS that Mohawk was using no longer met its requirements. After a comprehensive review of Content Management Systems in the marketplace, Mohawk decided that Drupal best met its current and future needs.

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Strategy

Drupal appealed to Mohawk because it’s fully responsive by default (an important consideration given the younger demographic of its primary user group). It offers impressive scalability and flexibility to meet future content development needs. The CMS interface is intuitive and accessible for people with varying technical expertise (critical as not all content creators have deep CMS knowledge).

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Northern segmented the Mohawk project into a series of four development sprints focused on delivering a set of core functionality, an approach to enhance the default Drupal content view with popular contributed modules.

CKEditor Widgets - creating unique widgets that inject pre-crafted responsive HTML into the body field to allow for the page content type customization.
Input Formats - users with different skill sets receive roles that customize the editor experience to their ability. For example, a WYSIWYG editor and manipulating image system are useless to a user with low vision.
Workbench Suite - this popular contributed module set allows for menu-based or taxonomy-based access schemes with simple moderation and approval workflows.
Administrative Views - custom content views created with external filters to allow content to be easily found and maintained by various user roles.

Results

Mohawk College’s new website has the following features and functionality:

Cleaner, more modern design
Responsive HTML/CSS development
Improved global search
Accessibility compliance
News feed
Staff profiles
Campus overviews
Enhanced academic dates and events pages with filtered search
The program pages are vastly improved; they’re almost microsites, with multiple tabs to help prospective students drill down to the information they need and provide rich media like image galleries and video.