Division of Animal Care migrates from Drupal to Omni

Posted by Lacy Paschal on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 in Launch.

The Division of Animal Care approached us about migrating their site from a Drupal installation to Omni. They were hosted with an external vendor and had been working with a third party design and development firm. They had numerous issues both with using Drupal and with authenticating through VUnetID.

We moved them in-house onto Vanderbilt’s secure server and migrated all their content into Omni. The entire DAC site is behind VUnetID authentication for privacy purposes. By hosting the site on our secure server, we can easily add VUnetID authentication to the site.

We put all the staff profile information into a database for the DAC people section (staff profiles and listing pages). Then we have two templates in Omni that build out the whole people section: the profile page and the listing pages.  So much simpler and way more efficient than building 80+ profile pages out individually. The listing pages are super simple — we just filter by the audience variable — and we can easily list, for example, the leadership team. Again – with one template file. Awesomeness. I do love me some efficient code.

DAC had quite a few forms on their site. We recreated all those in Sitemason (because Omni’s form module hasn’t yet been released – and Sitemason does such a great job with forms!)

An additional benefit of this project is the bottom line – by using our office for development and support and Vanderbilt servers for hosting, DAC is experiencing considerable cost savings over their previous site.

We worked with John Mallory and Printha McCallum on the site. Both have been trained and maintain the site themselves now. They’re so happy with Omni that they have a second website we’ll be migrating for them in the spring! We love happy clients :)

Tags: forms, mysql, omni, php, sitemason, vunetid