Domini Advisor / Migrating to Drupal CMS

Domini is an investment firm specializing exclusively in socially responsible investing. They manage funds for individual and institutional investors who wish to integrate social and environmental standards in to their investment decisions.

Domini maintains two separate websites that use some of the same content. Domini.com has basic information on investing and is geared towards the public and potential investors, Dominiadvisor.com contains that same information while also posting information on the performance of their funds for Domini clients.

In addition to maintaining two separate websites with often overlapping content, Domini had access and revision control concerns. They wanted to make sure that each department had the proper access to their content while not being able to make changes to areas outside their own. Additionally, any changes that are made to the site need to be properly reviewed by administrators before being posted; any changes have to be kept in a repository in case they need to revert back to previous versions.

Migrating to Drupal

To address Domini’s main areas of concern, Accella helped Domini migrate their two sites to Drupal, an open source content management system, where they can easily manage content and push it out to both sites.

Some of the main areas of focus when migrating content from their existing content management system to Drupal were:

• Content Type Definitions
• Theme Integration
• Drupal customizations to handle things such as the Fund calculations
• Search modifications to allow the use of Fund #, CUSIP, or Symbols
• Multi-Site configuration ability

This project involved using Domini’s existing design, Accella did the coding and development work necessary move to Drupal in roughly three weeks. Domini is now able to:

• Centrally Manage Content – All content would reside in Drupal’s CMS. Once in there, it could be pushed out to either of their websites, or both of them. Once updated, changes would be reflected in the proper site. This also gives Domini an added advantage of being able to easily create future sites using their existing content.
• Review Content Before Posting – Being a financial institution, posting inaccurate information is unacceptable for their executives. All content that is added, modified, or deleted, must go through an approval process before posting live on their site. Drupal CMS allows them to do this.
• Role-Based Users – Domini has a team of individuals that handle website maintenance and updating content. Users are assigned to specific groups which have defined roles, this allows Domini to grant certain levels of access to certain teams or individuals, adding a much needed layer of security.
• Visual Form Creation – Administrators to the site are able to easily create forms for their site without any coding knowledge. These forms can then be populated with financial data for display on their dominiadvisors site giving their investors access to updated content on a regular basis. Additionally forms can be posted live to the site to be filled in by visitors to the site to collect information.

One of the main advantages of using Drupal as a CMS is the ability to quickly change the look and feel for the site. With the right set-up and coding foundation, in the future Domini will be able to implement updated or new themes to change the user interface for their site, while the content remains the same. This is important with building a site’s longevity, as it may look brand new to the human eye, however in the “eyes” of search engine spiders, the site’s authority remains the same.

Quick Overview:

• Domini migrated two static sites to a singe CMS feeding two dynamic domains
• Users can easily update content through various roles
• All content changes are reviewed by Web Site Administrators
• All work was performed in roughly three weeks
• Domini now has an easy path for making changes and updates to their site, from the content to the look and feel

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