OpenConcept

The Canadian Union of Public Employees is Canada’s largest union, with over 627,000 members from various public and para-public services. The union has over 70 offices across the country, with headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario.

Project

CUPE wanted to develop an effective, national web presence that would inform and serve CUPE members, potential new members, the press and the general public. The project also required migrating content from an old, open-source CMS that was no longer maintained. A new design and revised architecture gave the site a refreshed look and improved usability.

Services

• Drupal consulting and implementation
• Information architecture
• Drupal Theming
• Multilingual development
• Data migration
• Accessibility consulting and improvements (AODA-WCAG 2.0 A)
• Security enhancement
• Quality Testing

Challenges and outcome

CUPE website’s multilingual development was addressed using the Entity Translation module, chosen over node translation to ensure search results lists, views and entity references stay identical in both English and French. The site navigation was based on searches, which led us to use a complex search interface to optimize the navigation. We also started building a collection of modules called the Engage project to provide CUPE with an updated tool for petition campaigns and workshop registration management. Further functionality and integration with OpenNorth is planning for the next stage of development. As a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer, Mike Gifford provided useful training and recommendations on making an accessible website. Throughout the project, design process and scope changes provided some challenges. Our Scrum project management process allowed us to easily adapt to changes in requirements and priorities. CUPE’s website was successfully launched in May 2014.

Technologies

• Drupal 7
• Entity Translation, Petition Tools, Search API Solr Search with Facet API, Entity Registration.
• HTML5