The Client
Since 2011, General Assembly has transformed tens of thousands of careers through pioneering, experiential education in today’s most in-demand skills.
The Situation
General Assembly had a desire to empower it's marketing team to maintain the content on the site without help from developers. This would help the team be more efficient and timely with marketing content and the time saved would reduce the cost of site maintenance.
The Challenge
Before the project started, General Assembly was maintaining a home grown CMS. This platform had become unwieldy. The integration with things like course listings weren't working well, and the marketing team required significant develop help to get any content changed on the site.
The Solution
General Assembly teamed up with Phase2 and Acquia to build a Drupal 8 platform hosted on Acquia cloud to provide a system that would empower the marketing team to maintain and grow the best digital experience possible for their audience, and without the assistance of developers. The Drupal 8 platform's API-friendly architecture allows General Assembly to serve live coursework updates directly on the site from their coursework system. A pattern lab library was incorporated into their Drupal 8 platform to help the marketing team streamline their branded elements and maintain a clean consistent design across various web pages.
As Phase 2 worked with General Assembly to progressively migrate features and content to a new Drupal platform. Acquia cloud hosting was incredibly helpful. Phase 2 used several cloud environments to launch varying sized code releases to enable changes conveniently and at the speed the marketing team needed them.
The Results
The Drupal 8 platform build allowed General Assembly to progressively migrate sites and content from their old home grown CMS to Drupal without interruption, and with both systems working in tandem. The flexibility and user-friendly nature of Drupal's administrative interface allows the marketing team to increase speed of content updates while lowering the cost of site maintenance because they do not need developer assistance.