Drupal 10 Upgrade for Government Portal
NC Department of Labor
Overview
The N.C. Department of Labor’s (NDCOL) “One Stop Shop” portal serves as the central hub for all Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) standards, providing employees with crucial information and resources to ensure workplace safety and compliance. NCDOL partnered with Atlantic BT to transition an outdated Cold Fusion system to a more flexible and powerful Drupal 9 platform, subsequently maintaining it through a Drupal 10 upgrade for its advanced capabilities and security features.
Project Type
Custom Website
Technology
Drupal
Industry
Government
Our Process
Company Overview
The North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL) is a government agency responsible for promoting the health, safety, and general well-being of the state’s workforce. It enforces various labor laws, including those related to workplace safety, wage and hour standards, and employment practices. The NCDOL also provides education, training, and consultation services to ensure businesses comply with state and federal regulations. Its mission is to foster a safe and healthy working environment across North Carolina, supporting both employers and employees.
The Ask
NCDOL requested to move away from their outdated ColdFusion-based technology for their OSH portal, which required administrators to use coding and Dreamweaver to edit and add new pages. This made content management cumbersome and inefficient. Additionally, employees found it difficult to locate documents and information due to the current disorganized structure and limited search functionality, which hindered productivity and access to important resources. In addition, NCDOL wanted to update their internal intranet from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9.
Our Drupal 10 Upgrade Process
Discovery
During the discovery phase, we conducted a series of stakeholder interviews to gain a deep understanding of the organizational needs of the North Carolina Department of Labor. To further explore the workflow and specific tasks performed, we carried out contextual inquiries with NCDOL Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) employees. We facilitated card-sorting exercises to organize the portal’s content in line with users’ mental models. Lastly, we conducted a survey to gather insights on the most important information, enabling us to prioritize content effectively.
Design
In the design process, we used the feedback from our user research to create a more user-friendly experience. We improved the overall structure of the portal, making it easier to navigate and access key information. We designed a new Training Courses section, along with the functionality for users to upload content and generate courses using Adobe Captivate. Additionally, we introduced a Favorites feature, allowing individuals to save important documents within the intranet for quick access, enhancing the overall usability and efficiency of the platform.
Development
To start development we executed a database dump to untangle ColdFusion taxonomy terms. We leveraged a suite of Drupal modules, including Paragraphs for rich text content structuring, Hierarchical Taxonomy for complex content organization, Search Solr for enhanced search functionality, Taxonomy Menus for navigational ease, Webforms for user submissions, Drush for efficient command-line management, and SMTP for reliable email communication. We set up user permissions so that only specific users could access specific course content. Finally, we supported the transition with a server upgrade to PHP 8, ensuring long-term stability and performance.
Deploy
Hosted securely behind a private VPN, our role extended beyond mere migration; we provided ongoing support and managed all deployments through tailored custom scripts. This approach ensured a seamless transition and operational continuity, aligning with the client’s infrastructure constraints while significantly improving content management and site usability.
Delight
IIn conclusion, the project culminated with a successful migration from ColdFusion to Drupal 9, followed by a Drupal 10 upgrade. In addition, we restructured the NCDOL OSH portal using taxonomy terms to provide better organization and archiving documents as well as improving content discovery. We migrated the platform from ColdFusion to Drupal 9, making it significantly easier to edit content throughout the portal in one place. A robust search functionality was integrated to enhance file retrieval, and we successfully migrated all files to the new platform. Additionally, we created dynamic views, eliminating the need for static HTML pages, allowing for more flexible content management.