Introduction
The Royal Mencap Society, founded 1943, is the 15th largest charity in the UK with an annual spend of ?188m. Mencap.org.uk plays a crucial role in providing information and support to learning disabilities and their families. Their legacy CMS, an ASP based platform, had become outdated and bottleneck within the webteam's workflow. Mencap chose to replace this with Drupal, attracted by the lack of license fees, flexibility and wide spread use in the charity sector.
Cameron & Wilding were selected as part of a competitive tendering process, based on their strong track record of implementing complex Drupal sites.
Planning
The project kicked off with several client workshops to further define requirements, high level planning of the project and content discovery. It quickly became apparent that, as well as the development of the website, there were two other important tasks which needed to run concurrently: content migration and providing the functionality for transactions (e.g. donations and tickets).
Website Development
Mencap cater to many different groups: people with learning disabilities, local groups organisers, families and journalists. The complexity of the site reflects this. There are around 6000 pieces of content distributed across twenty site sections including news, events, blogs, forums, support information aimed at people with learning disabilities, videos and podcasts.
All this functionality was easily created with Drupal contrib and custom modules. The complexity of the site structure required close cooperation with the client to ensure that the new site met the needs of the users. An Apache Solr powered search provides an efficient "drill-down" search, allowing users to easily find the content they are looking for.
Particular care was taken with the backend of the site to ensure it was as user friendly as possible. Mencap have a sizeable webteam who use the site on a daily basis, it was therefore important that the site was as easy to use as possible. This was achieved by the use of vertical tabs module, clear labelling of fields and taking a "less is more" approach to granting permissions to users.
Transactions
As with most charities, donations are a critical part of Mencap's website. Mencap run multiple donation campaigns each collecting different information from donors. Mencap also needed the flexibility to be able quickly create new donation campaigns.
To fulfil this, a transaction layer was built on top of the webform module. The webform module allows for the quick construction of forms, collection of submissions and the export of data. Cameron & Wilding then created a custom module which takes the user to a payment page (hosted by Secure Trading) on submission of the form. On verification of payment the Drupal site receives a ping from the payment gateway indicating that transaction has occurred.
This donation platform was further developed to provide ticketing for events. Once a transaction has been verified, it also reduces the availability of tickets. Event organisers are then able to export a report of all attendees, unique ticket numbers and other attendee information.
Migration
The legacy site had built up around 4000 pieces of structured content, each piece with important meta data such as author, comments and publication dates. Cameron & Wilding worked closely with Mencap's technical team to ensure that this was accurately migrated across to the Drupal site.
Mencap's technical team worked to migrate the data out of the MSSQL database and into a an agreed schema in a MySQL database. The data was then run through several scripts to create the nodes in the Drupal site. Along with the textual content, images were taken from BLOBs stored in the database and turned into files which were then added to the Drupal file system.
The final complication was to correctly structure the content in the original hierarchy. This was acheived by marrying up old IDs with new NIDs and running the content through a series of scripts which entered the content into the Drupal menu system.
Conclusion
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Notes:
- By income: http://www.charitiesdirect.com/charities/top500rank.php?Sort=I&Order=1
