University of Cambridge: SOCM

The approach

In order to meet the tight delivery timeline, our delivery team collaborated closely with the School in the definition of requirements and success criteria, ensuring aligned expectations from the offset. Early stages of delivery also involved a review of any existing code and design systems provided by the School. 

Starting from a clean foundation

The School provided an existing Drupal system that had been built to act as a foundation for the project. This came with a large quantity of custom modules and multiple modules that would be unused by the School, therefore, from a backend perspective, the decision was made to start largely from scratch. This ensured we reduced digital bloat, and promoted maintainability in the long-term success of the platform through reducing the level of unnecessary customisation. 

Adapting to tailwind

Our team made use of Tailwind as the CSS framework of choice, as our team usually use BEM, this resulted in quickly adapting the demands required from Tailwind. 

As Tailwind provides a large set of pre-defined CSS classes from the offset, this presented a learning curve in our team quickly getting up to speed in the Tailwind class teams that were previously unfamiliar. 

Enhancing components and editor experience

Improvements were then made to the components provided. This was particularly beneficial in guaranteeing the responsive nature of development, ensuring a performant experience regardless of device selected. Our team also drove improvements in the logical grouping of content and fields in the editor experience, ensuring a clear hierarchy between pages that will support the long-term scalability of the site.