Acquia Drupal for Higher Education

The call to digital transformation

A private liberal arts and sciences college came to Hounder in need of developing Drupal backend components that enabled them to showcase student journeys, origin stories, and what students accomplished after graduation. This included creating seamless navigation throughout and between each individual student’s story, as well as embedding journey maps that display student movement as they traveled from home, to school, and abroad.

They communicated a desire for seamless navigation throughout and between each individual student’s page, as well as embedded journey maps that display student movement as their academic paths led them from home, to school, and abroad.

Acquia sets the stage

So, after spending time getting to know the institution, its needs, and its vision, our development and design teams got to work cranking out Drupal solutions and planning UX/UI strategies made possible by the power of Acquia DXP.

Navigate the journey & tell the story right

With our solutions in motion, we realized that our efforts needed to work toward answering one vital question: How do we utilize our dev and design expertise to help the fine folks in the college’s media department realize their storytelling needs?

After all, these are real stories told by real people chasing a meaningful academic experience in a very real world... And we wanted to bring their site visitors as close to that fact as possible.

To answer the question at hand, first, we resourced our design team to come up with a user experience committed to communicating the school’s student journeys in an interactive and eye-catching manner. Wireframes and creative input firing full bore, our developers got straight to work transfiguring their deep dev expertise into pure Acquia + Drupal magic.

ESRI, Acquia, and Hounder tech unite to help this college showcase student journeys around the globe... Literally.

Using the above map application powered by both ESRI arcGIS and Acquia Experience, we built this school a robust mapping application that allows them to tell their stories from a geospatial perspective. By interacting with the globe shown above, their site visitors can skate across the Earth while learning about the diverse trajectories students experience after graduation.

Breaking down the vision

In order to build the institution an ability for interactive storytelling, complete with navigable story maps and easily curated student images + videos, Hounder strutted our tried and true process map according to this sequence of team operations

1. The development and design team worked closely with college representatives to form an in-depth understanding of their needs and creative vision. 

2. Design team: Envision and create templates that will act as inspiration for development. 

3. Dev team: Templatize design. Code Drupal components based on design team’s work. 

4. Merge backend and frontend with the power of Acquia.

Delivering key items for successful storytelling

The college received a thorough development and design treatment, with long hours spent fine-tuning the design's intended look, feel, and function. Our dev team and their took the school's vision and broke it down into the bits of logic necessary to code an intuitive yet detailed Drupal backend—a tool the school will continue to use as forthcoming student journeys begin to dot across the map.

Here's what we delivered:

• 20 student journeys (pages)

• Student content: Stories, videos, images. 

• Incorporate existing code/modules into Acquia Cloud. 

• Create story maps: Place existing content from Arc GIS into new pages. 

• Configured Drupal CMS

• Component-driven flexible content editor

• Reusable code blocks

• A templatized system

The result

By the end of our own journey, we delivered custom Drupal  components with easy, intuitive editing, a templatized system as easy to explore as possible, navigation styles that highlight the unique aspect of each individual student journey, and reusable code blocks that are easy to apply to each student’s page.