Case Study
Dimpact WIM 2.1
About the client
Dimpact is a Dutch nonprofit organization aiming to help municipalities cut costs and be more organized and efficient through collaboration when it comes to various IT needs.
The challenge
Dimpact developed WIM 1.0 Drupal distro a while ago. Over time, requirements were significantly expanded, and the existing platform was not able to keep up with them.
Thus, our goal was to clean up existing platform, add missing features, make it future-proof, and migrate web projects of 16 municipalities (resulting in ~30 separate websites) to the new version.
Delivered value
New WIM2.0 Drupal distribution providing
- easy-to-use and user-friendly administration panel;
- exciting new and significantly improved existing features;
- consistency across the platform; and
- much cleaner, secure and bulletproof implementation leveraging latest best practices in Drupal and PHP worlds.
The process
In the spring of 2016 our partners out of the Netherlands, GoalGorilla agency, proposed a great opportunity to collaborate on a Drupal distribution for municipalities. Cooperative Association Dimpact, that had built the first version of the platform back in 2013, decided to improve it and develop WIM version 2.
Together with GoalGorilla and Dimpact, we were inspired to create modern, integrated and reusable technology for municipalities around the world. We started development process, and in autumn 2016 Dimpact WIM version 2 was successfully released.
The project was divided into 2 phases: new version of distribution and migration.
During the discovery phase, we found out that there were a lot of unnecessary features, so the decision was made to remove them from WIM 2.0. Also, some features were implemented in not the best way. We refactored such features and developed other ones from the scratch. For example, WIM 1.0 allowed adding CSS rules on pages from the admin panel.
On the one hand, this feature was super powerful, but it created more issues than benefits. The most prominent was inconsistency among pages. We approached the project using the atomic design principle. This principle limits a content manager to some extent but provides a much more structured and consistent look and feel.
The migration phase was quite challenging as well. Due to personal data protection reasons, we were not able to get a live database dump and do a migration locally, fix edge cases manually and then deploy a fixed version to a production environment. Everything had to be automated with no manual work. It took some efforts to fix all these issues, but, in the end, it was a success.
Currently 18 municipalities in the Netherlands are getting advantages of the platform, such as Coevorden, Oost Gelre, Oldambt, Emmen, Borne, Raalte and more will join soon!
In this project, the LS team gained exceptional experience in Drupal distribution development and content migration.
Technologies
Drupal 7
Apache Solr
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