We worked with Competitive Advantage to update the design of their website, port it to the most current version of Drupal, and migrate away from their former eCommerce system to Commerce. Improvements to the checkout workflow were implemented, product images were updated, and full content control was given to Competitive Advantage to maintain product copy.

We worked with a very detailed set of specifications on this project. The team at YUP were very clear about the data structures and attributes that were needed. Drupal’s Organic Groups were the perfect solution for the needs of this project. Some parts of the site needed to be accessible to accounts with codes from a specific book. Other parts of the site needed to be available to students with access to any book.

We built two separate registration forms with different fields on each form. On the site, users self-select the form that they need to fill out. Successful registration requires a valid access code for student accounts, which are then automatically activated. Instructors are able to register without entering an access code, but those accounts need to be reviewed and activated by the site administrator. Automated emails are sent during and after registration, and notifications are sent to users when their account is about to expire.

After registration, all of the information entered during registration is visible and editable by both the user and the administrator on the user’s account page. Some custom work was needed to make this page display the correct fields in a user-friendly format. We used the Yale authentication system as the basis of the site authentication functionality; it was important, though, that the login screen not look like a Yale login screen, since most of the site users would have no direct connection with the Yale community. 

Access codes needed to be generated within the system by the site administrator for the two existing volumes of the text. All codes needed to be associated with a specific volume of the text (Book 1 or Book 2), and not be able to be transferred to a different account or otherwise be re-used. Since Books 3 and 4 were in production at the time of this project, the system needed to allow the administrators to generate the codes for content that did not yet exist so that those codes could be printed in the books. A user account needed to be able to have multiple access codes to different content with different expiration dates.

Current users would need to be migrated to the new site and matched with codes that would provide access to the correct volume and for the correct amount of time. Yale was able to perform the user migration on their own, using documentation and training provided by LCM.

To enhance the value to the community, we developed and implemented several enhancements. Our focus centered around adjustments to the logic behind the forum posts and replies. Our work included a more intuitive nesting and notification system, as well as new voting and ranking logic to better surface posts of value to community members. Effort was also dedicated to improving the pathways and user experience, guiding them to the desired conversations.

We developed and implemented an upgrade and migration path for the site with 85 modules, including 35 custom modules, to bring the site to a fully functioning Drupal 7 build. The upgrade was fully developed and its deployment was seamless. The Rainforest Alliance site went from Drupal 6 to 7 with zero downtime.

We enjoy working as a team to deliver on our full service commitments.

We deliver a range of expertise to provide solutions for things like integrating with SalesForce to pull in membership data, integrating for set automated set up of group based content access on their subscriptions driven web service. Another example, moving them to a highly available, scalable cloud based infrastructure with Apache Solr and high performance caching technologies.

When it’s business as usual, the site serves as a platform to generate awareness for how someone can better prepare themselves and their family in the event of an emergency. Visitors can download checklists, and complete forms, in addition to reading about how to prepare for different kinds of disasters, like an earthquake or tsunami. However, in the event of an emergency, the City can quickly enable a separate emergency home page which presents visitors with vastly different dynamic content updated in real time specific to the emergency, including an embedded interactive Google Crisis Map that displays information aggregated from a variety of external sources managed by the City.

Last Call Media provided a direct replacement of the existing site in Drupal 8, leveraging the out-of-the box D8 accessibility features and the user-friendly D8 in-place content editing interface. We also reduced the maintenance burden by bringing the blog, which had been a separate site, into the main site.

Our accessibility audit revealed that the original color palette used for the site designed relied heavily on colors that did not meet WCAG 2.0 contrast requirements. We were able to identify a compliant color scheme that remained within the existing brand guidelines for the new site. The site also relied heavily on icon fonts which were not taking advantage of Unicode’s private use area, and the HTML elements displaying the icons did not use appropriate ARIA attributes. Rebuilding the icon font and HTML markup to take advantage of those tools helped to greatly improve the screen reader experience for the site.

Another area that needed improvement was general accessibility related to interactive elements. Sections like flyout menus and tabs were difficult to navigate via keyboard, and were missing ARIA attributes that make them easier to understand and use. During the rebuild we switched away from using mostly-homegrown CSS and JS, and leveraged the Foundation CSS/JS framework instead. This change provided a couple of benefits - many of the missing accessibility features are included in the components provided by Foundation out of the box, it helped keep the nuanced details of the styling more consistent across different areas of the site, and it expedited the development process as well.

The main StoryCorps Archive access point was built on a robust Drupal platform consisting of over 60,000 interview records and approximately 27TB of associated metadata, WAVs, MP3s, JPGs and PDFs. The StoryCorps Archive platform connected with several critical business systems and performed around-­the-­clock ingests from their on­site storage arrays to the Drupal system, via rsync. StoryCorps was looking for a trusted and capable firm to migrate their entire Archive— including the website, connected services, and media— from their single-­server host to a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2, S3 and Glacier.

Last Call Media performed a thorough analysis and audit of all StoryCorps’ source data prior to and following the massive migration. We worked closely with StoryCorps’ internal Digital Team and engineering consultants to design, test, implement, and ultimately maintain the new AWS server infrastructure.

In the discovery phase, we reviewed the marketplace to find the most appropriate CDN for the State’s use case, balancing security, performance, and cost considerations. Ultimately, Cloudflare was selected as the best fit because of its extensive firewall and DDOS protections, and granular cache control using “Cache Tags,” which have the potential to boost performance for the constituents and reduce the risk of site instability.  

The first, and perhaps most critical concern we addressed in the course of this project was that the CDN needed to be resilient, serving pages even if the site itself was not functioning properly. For example, the development team does code releases periodically that take the backend of the site completely offline, but constituents still need to be able to access content during this time. To meet this requirement, we adjusted the site’s caching headers to include directives to serve cached responses in the event of an error response received from the origin.  As a result, constituents are able to access the majority of Mass.gov, even if a catastrophic event takes the web servers completely offline.

As a government website, Mass.gov is always at risk of attack from malicious actors. To mitigate this risk, Last Call Media undertook extensive configuration and testing of Cloudflare’s various security features, including the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDOS protections, and custom firewall rules. We had a few hiccups along the way with configuring the security features (at one point, content authors were receiving CAPTCHA verifications when submitting their changes), but were ultimately able to work through these issues to dial in the right balance of security and ease-of-use.

Next, we implemented Cloudflare’s brand new “Workers” feature, which gives granular control over CDN functionality using a javascript “service worker.” The Worker we wrote for this project handles more than 6 million requests a day, and gives the Commonwealth the ability to test and deploy CDN level changes to development, staging, and production environments independently, making it much faster and safer to verify and release changes. The worker implementation benefits the Commonwealth giving them flexibility for the future, while also reducing cost over the previous CDN.

These workers were also integral to the success of this migration beyond what we had initially imagined. During the testing and release phases of the project, they gave us a mechanism for fixing changes that was reviewable and testable. Having a well-defined review and deployment process improved the team’s visibility into what changes were being made, and let us avoid silly mistakes. Overall, we felt the development team’s velocity was greatly improved by using this workflow.

As multidisciplinary business partners, we worked with the Press to first understand their business requirements through a review of their internal pain points, future goals and the needs of their users. This information, combined with our existing knowledge of the project, informed our approach to building the new platform.

The primary goal of this project was to provide students, instructors, and teaching assistants with access to the ancillary materials for a course book. At the outset, the resources were spread out among dozens of different sites, which made updating the resources and tracking their usage impossible. The types of resources the Press had available for each book varied from book to book, but included PDFs, videos, quizzes and other interactive content. Further, some resources for a book are only appropriate for instructors or teaching assistants, and it would be detrimental to the Press if these items were made available to students or anonymous users.  

We approached this problem by first determining what each group needed to be able to access. We fleshed out the concept of a resource, and built an admin interface to create resources attached to a specific book, group them, and manage the access level.  

Next, we determined how they would access it (the signup workflow for each type of user).  For example, students could be granted immediate access to a book’s resources as soon as they requested it as long as they were able to answer a verification question, while instructors needed additional manual verification and administrator approval, and teaching assistants would be granted access immediately by an existing instructor. We built out three distinct registration and access request workflows, and tested them rigorously to make sure they made sense to nontechnical users.  

Before this upgrade, the Press managed over 50 disparate sites with no central reporting system. This fragmented infrastructure prevented them from gathering any meaningful information about their users, was leading to missed opportunities at the Press.

Advanced reporting and analytics were introduced to support the goal of better defining and understanding the Press’ audience. Common questions they faced included: Who is utilizing our material? What do they find useful? What items don’t get used as frequently? To answer these questions, we worked with the Press to codify the most important data they were interested in knowing about their customers, and built a system to capture that data at key moments during the user registration workflow. On the admin side, we created a unified reporting experience that allows Press employees to manage users and obtain report data about their users through a single, powerful interface. For content usage reporting, we leveraged Google Analytics to capture segmented traffic data. The level of reporting that is now possible on the platform has helped inform critical business decisions at the Press.

Lastly, we digitalized an existing labor intensive and inefficient paper process at the Press to allow instructors to be able to request desk and exam copies of course books through their existing account. The platform replaces lengthy paper forms that had to be faxed to the Press with a digital version that prefills information based on the book and user and can be submitted easily.