One of the university's main goals was to open up content management beyond the central digital team. Faculty staff needed to create and update their own content, but within guardrails that maintained quality and consistency.

We ran workshops with stakeholders across the university to map out how content flows from creation to publication. From those sessions we designed a role-based editorial workflow with four tiers, from content authors through faculty managers to publishers and administrators, each with carefully scoped permissions.

We implemented the Group and Content Access modules to create editing silos so faculty teams could only access their own content. The Workflow module introduced proper draft, review and approval states, along with scheduled publishing. Content versioning meant changes could be previewed and rolled back.

We replaced the sluggish Paragraphs-based editing interface with Layout Builder, giving editors a more visual page-building experience. Editorial pages that had previously taken several seconds to load became responsive and usable. Faculty teams could actually get on with managing their content.

This was one of the biggest wins of the project. The university's data import process had relied on standalone PHP scripts that pushed content into Drupal via REST API. It was a bespoke system: slow, fragile, and an additional codebase that needed maintaining independently of the main site.

We converted every import process to use Drupal's core Migrate framework. This is an ETL system built into Drupal itself, defined in structured YAML configuration files, with a rich set of extraction, transformation and loading plugins.

The benefits landed straight away. Import performance improved because Migrate uses direct database access via Drupal's own APIs rather than HTTP network transfers. The entire standalone import codebase, a separate piece of software the university had been maintaining, was retired. Everything now lives inside the Drupal project, maintained by the same team, using the same tools and processes.

We converted the indirect field references to proper Drupal entity references too. Previously, when a research output page needed to display its associated researchers, the system would store identifiers from Pure and look them up at runtime, loading the relevant content on the fly for every page view. Now those relationships are resolved at import time by the Migrate framework, which handles the mappings between systems automatically. Page rendering got noticeably faster because the data is already linked, with no more uncached lookups on every request.

The Migrate framework also gave the university proper handling of deleted records, logging of successful updates, error reporting and migration statistics, none of which existed reliably in the old system.

The university's development workflow had been largely manual, with code tagging, releases and deployments all done by hand. The codebase was fragmented across multiple repositories, making even routine updates painfully slow. The university already used parts of the Azure cloud platform, so it made sense to bring the website into that world.

We consolidated everything into a single repository and built out a full CI/CD pipeline on Azure DevOps. Every pull request triggers automated test runs, visual regression tests via Backstop, coding standards checks and static analysis. Developers get fast feedback and the whole team has more confidence in the codebase.

We delivered staging environments on Azure, implemented a proper tagged release and deployment process, configured server-side cron for background operations like migrations, and set up Renovate for automated dependency updates.

We put in place the full groundwork for Azure production hosting: autoscaling containers that respond to CPU load, point-in-time database recovery for up to 35 days, versioned blob storage and a global CDN for the university's international audience. The architecture means the site can handle traffic spikes during clearing and results days without breaking a sweat.

The university now has a Drupal platform that matches the ambition of a world-class research institution. Data imports that were previously slow and error-prone run faster and more reliably through Drupal Migrate, with an entire separate codebase eliminated in the process. Editors across faculties can manage their own content through proper workflows with quality controls baked in. Developers work with a clean, consolidated codebase backed by CI/CD and automated testing. And the Azure infrastructure is built to scale with demand, from routine daily traffic through to the peaks of clearing and results season.

What started as a technical review became a real change in how the university manages its digital presence. We worked as an extension of their in-house team, running workshops, pairing with developers, and making sure knowledge transferred at every stage. The internal team's willingness to run with recommendations straight away was one of the best things about the engagement.