University Faculty & Research Portal

The research portal content model treats people, research groups, projects, publications, courses and policies as distinct entity types with relationships between them. A professor’s profile is written once; it then appears on their research group’s page, on the courses they teach and beside the publications they authored, always identical because it is the same record.

Views and Paragraphs assemble pages from this structured content, and Solr search indexes it, so visitors can search people and research by department, topic or type rather than wading through near-duplicate pages.

• People, groups, projects, publications and courses as related entities
• Profiles authored once, shown everywhere
• Faceted Solr search across the faculty

The Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migration ran through Drupal’s Migrate API, which allowed content to be transformed into the new model rather than copied as-is. Duplicate profiles were merged, inconsistent course pages consolidated and orphaned pages identified for review. Migrations were repeatable, so they could be re-run against fresh data until the faculty was happy with the result.

Every one of the 6,800 existing pages was mapped to its new address and redirected, so links from other university sites, publications and search results continued to work after the switch.

Editorial workflow gives each research group and department control over its own content, with permissions scoped so editors see and change only what they own. A review step sits before publication, letting group leads or the communications team check changes without becoming a bottleneck for everyday updates.

Editors work with structured fields rather than free-form pages, which keeps formatting consistent and makes the site much easier to maintain as people come and go.

As a multilingual Drupal site, the portal manages translation per field, with a visible pending state. A page updated in one language shows which translations need attention, and nothing publishes half-translated. Editors and translators can see at a glance where each language stands.

The theme was designed and tested for accessibility from the start: keyboard operation, colour contrast, heading structure and screen-reader behaviour were checked throughout development, and the finished site passed an independent audit at WCAG 2.2 AA.