American Hospital Association Enterprise Drupal Platform

The Challenge

The legacy system the American Hospital Association (AHA) was using to support close to 50 sites had reached end-of-life status years ago. They envisioned an Enterprise Drupal Platform (EDP) which would function as a repository CMS for all their brands. They started with their flagship site aha.org and migrated it into a new Drupal 8 installation which was unfortunately poorly executed by a previous vendor (both the initial setup of the installation and the migration of data).

As with most migrations to new platforms, this effort was an opportunity to update the content model but this was not undertaken. When Chromatic inherited the project, we revised and streamlined the data model for use across multiple sites.

Moreover, the implementation of their Elasticsearch (ES) server needed remediation as there was no viable upgrade path for the ES instances given that the contributed modules were hacked in the source code. AHA’s ES version was soon approaching end-of-life and required updating regularly to stay in compliance with their security protocols and mandates.

The Solution

• We refactored their initial Drupal 8 site architecture to serve as a bonafide Enterprise Drupal Platform (EDP) in order to provide a clean, consistent end-user and editorial experience of their flagship and satellite sites.

• We simplified their overly complex and redundant data model by defining clear, distinct content structures for component re-use and design/layout flexibility.

• We developed a strategy for managing their numerous domains within a single content management system for the sake of code maintenance/re-use, security updates, common theme layers, etc. to be eventually taken over by their small, internal development team which we groomed and trained.

• We refactored their search platform for versatile use across all their parent and child sites.

• We ran performance audits to identify and remediate slow queries and bottlenecks in their code base.

• We vastly improved the performance of their flagship site by removing heavy and hacked modules, refactoring their taxonomy permissions, node access, etc.

• We migrated 15 of AHA’s digital properties to their EDP from legacy applications.

• We wrote migration scripts with replicable continuity in mind.

• We built their front end tool chain from the ground up.

• We refactored their theming functionality to leverage shared styles in child themes.

• We built custom admin forms for managing customization of their child themes.

• We designed and developed custom, reusable theme components and CTAs.

• We crafted their SSO solution for a number of their gateway providers.

• We architected an interim MVP media asset library solution to serve all their sites while they shopped for and came to a consensus on a digital asset management (DAM) vendor.

• We implemented an on-demand QA preview process (Tugboat) to provide visibility during the development cycle.

• We trained and guided their in-house developers (who were new to Drupal) to:

  • Use a Composer-based workflow

  • Get accustomed with Drupal 8 configuration management

  • Do regular site maintenance and security updates

  • Write hook updates for massive data re-assignments

  • Implement theme changes

  • Manage QA and production deployment processes

Strong Finish

We took AHA from a single, flawed Drupal 8 installation to a performant enterprise-level platform that could host innumerable client sites each with flexible, modular components, custom themes, and independent domains. While we helped ramp up their internal team, we laid a stable foundation for their development workflows and forged a replicable migration pathway for all AHA’s digital properties.