Development and Alumni Relations at the University of Cambridge migrated their bespoke system for managing Alumni Groups into their Drupal and CiviCRM website. The new system went live in early January.
Visitors to the Alumni Groups section of our site now enjoy a more consistent user experience as the display is handled entirely by Drupal using our standard theme. Due to the flexible nature of Drupal and CiviCRM we were able to closely recreate the front end experience from the previous bespoke system, so users were not thrown by the change but benefited from a number of improvements. The Group pages are now more responsive, as the system no longer relies on a number of AJAX calls to the bespoke system which previously held the data. CiviCRM’s integration with Drupal Views ensures that Groups can be searched easily and more comprehensively by visitors.
About our Alumni Groups
The University of Cambridge has a network of almost 450 volunteer-led Alumni Groups. With a presence in over 100 countries around the world, we believe no other university has such a wide-reaching and extensive network.
A successful project
From a developer’s perspective the most notable benefit is the reduction in custom code. The old system had at least 7500 lines of code, in a Ruby application, and a PHP and JavaScript front-end. Now we have only around 500 lines of custom code, bundled into one single Drupal module. That’s 93% less custom code, and one less custom system to maintain!
Using a custom script we were able to leverage the powerful CiviCRM API to conduct the almost all the data migration for the project. Running the final migration of Group information was as simple as clicking ‘Import’.
We now store Group information in CiviCRM, and their website content in Drupal. The CiviCRM Entity and Views modules allow us to combine this information on a Group’s webpage. We refreshed the user experience too, so now we have a look and feel that is much more consistent with the rest of our website. We also saw dramatic improvements in page load times.
Many benefits came ‘for free’ during the project. We already had much of the structure to hold Group information and content in place in Drupal and CiviCRM. The unified administrator experience and full search engine indexing of Group pages (which was impossible in the old system) were also added bonuses.
A number of patches were submitted to both CiviCRM and Drupal throughout this process. The most notable being a new default argument for the CiviCRM Views integration which picks up a contact ID from the URL . This can be used to display contextual information about contacts on CiviCRM and Drupal. We use this to display a link for administrators, from the Group’s CiviCRM record to the linked Drupal content for the Group and vice versa. This Views functionality will be released with CiviCRM 4.6.
We now have a much more powerful and flexible platform for our Alumni Groups, built from the standard functionality provided by Drupal and CiviCRM. The new platform benefits everyone: it is easier for us to maintain, more consistent for administrators to use, and faster and more usable for the end user.
Claire Baxter – Alumni Relations Co-ordinator – Networks Development and Alumni Relations, University of Cambridge commented: “Incorporating the old custom built Alumni Groups system into both CiviCRM and Drupal has been incredibly successful from the point of view of an administrator. Having the ability to explore new functions, and build on what the two systems have to offer, has meant we now have a system which we had only dreamt of!”
