Build, migrate and integrate

Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is an independent policy institute and world-leading source of independent analysis, spearheading informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all.

They wanted a modern, responsive website with a clean design that would provide a better user experience and increase traffic. Additionally, one of the requirements was to integrate the website with their events and membership management software which is the backbone of the organisation for its members online experience. The previous integration between the two systems was very limited. 

Of course, within all this, we wanted to ensure that we'd meet Chatham House's objectives:

• Promote new policy ideas – publications and research projects – to our target audiences;

• Measure and be seen as a primary resource for international affairs analysis, including being regarded as a source of thoughtful, insightful commentary on relevant external events;

• Operate as an effective and efficient e-commerce site (for servicing conferences and membership in particular);

• Provide an engaging and valued portal for members.

Chatham House has been using the Drupal CMS since summer 2011. The previous Drupal 6 site was suffering from intermittent performance issues, a dated, non-responsive design and did not integrate effectively with Chatham House’s internal membership management software. It was decided to stay with Drupal as it proved to be a powerful and customisable platform that would cope well with their complex content structure and processes.

We worked with Chatham House to produce a fresh, modern and responsive design on a new Drupal 7 instance. Replacing a lot of custom content with tried and tested combinations of contributed modules – code provided by the community to extend Drupal's core – and a large, rolling content migration (more than 10,000 items) was required to move content from the old Drupal 6 site, to the new Drupal 7 site. Given the content heavy nature of some of the research topics on the new website, having real content available made both prototyping new features and final acceptance testing far easier than relying on placeholder content.

Starting in January 2014, the Drupal development of the new website was broken into 94 individual features and followed our Kanban driven approach.

Some key features of the site are the main navigational menu, mixing both traditional navigation items and content. Drupal’s menu system doesn’t permit this so we created our own menu. Fortunately, both the links to research departments and other parts of the site were relatively static; only requiring a few minor changes throughout the year. This made the process of building it a little more straight forward. We’ve mixed the main menu, membership login, and some featured content into this navigation menu – making it interactive and providing a lot of information in one small space, neatly.

Another new feature was the integration with the membership system, which greatly improves the member experience by providing a logged-in member dashboard, authentication support against the membership system (very similar to the LDAP module) and provides feeds of events from approved events data. It is also an authoritative data source for member data, asynchronously pulling in changes every 15 minutes. Meaning, the website will not go down or become unresponsive if the back end data store becomes unavailable.

After five months of intensive development, rolling content migrations, testing and final content entry, the new Chatham House website was launched on 2 June 2014. The retention of Drupal as a CMS platform provides yet another example of the capability of this Open Source platform as a highly capable solution for other similarly sized and high profile organisations throughout the world.

Read the full Drupal.org featured case study.

If you'd like to find out more about Chatham House's website, or want to discuss your upcoming project, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you.