Drupal Relaunch for the Robert Bosch Foundation

The most significant design change was the shift to a single responsive layout that automatically adapts to any device. The new web design emphasizes bold colors, motion images and prominently placed visuals. Editors can choose from the corporate color scheme for basically all content elements. Thus allowing them to create a vibrant and dynamic appearance, that convinces on every site. And the best Part? The entire process was designed to make the editorial process as simple as possible. Every page structure is based on content types and paragraph formats, which when combined create a modular system that enables editors to assemble and adjust a wide variety of content with just a few clicks.

Editorial elements can also be tagged with every needed metadata - Enabling content to be displayed automatically and dynamically across various sections of the website. Editorial publications are streamlined through the inline editing system. Allowing editors—when logged in—to switch directly from the frontend view to the editing mode for individual elements. The Advantage? With a single click, a wide variety of features, like automatic translation can be activated by the editors themself. Reducing the workload of manual post processing and enabling the editors to focus on content, not management.

The decision to use Drupal led to a complete rebuild of the website. Existing content had to be restructured and migrated into the new system, without compromising the existing editorial structure. To guarantee a safe and repeatable approach, we developed a powerful and flexible technical foundation that supports the migration of diverse media contents. A method that would prove especially helpful for later enhancements, where highly interconnected content structures had to be migrated, while the live system had to remain stable for readers, authors and employees.

Drupal proved especially advantageous, due to its adaptability to various design and functional requirements, offering editorial workflows based on content types and paragraph formats. A paragraph can represent a simple text, image or even interactive maps. This modular setup provides full flexibility and ease of use during editorial work. And thanks to our modular approach, we were not only able to integrate social media streams modularly for every page post hoc, but also make them as easy to use and deploy as for us to develop.

But why did we use Drupal? Our experience with building large and content heavy sites has shown, that Drupal offers numerous advantages over WordPress and other monolithic content management systems. Among them: Drupal has the largest active developer community, the most modern architecture and the best answer to editorial flexibility. Furthermore, Drupal’s modern and technically advanced framework makes it suitable for custom enhancements and system adaptations.