Genetic Alliance / Migration to Drupal CMS

How Genetic Alliance is Breaking free of a Proprietary CMS and moving to Drupal

Genetic Alliance is a not-for-profit (501-C3) organization committed to transforming health through genetics and promoting an environment of openness centered on the health of individuals, families, and communities. Its network includes more than 1,000 disease-specific advocacy organizations, as well as thousands of universities, private companies, government agencies, and public policy organizations. The network is a dynamic and growing open space for shared resources, creative tools, and innovative programs.

Genetic Alliance was in a bind, they had invested in a proprietary CMS system, which while performing well for them, did not allow them to expand their site as much as they hoped. “While our old CMS had done a pretty good job of upgrading we were limited to their (the developers) pace,” says Jim Bialick, health information systems coordinator for Genetic Alliance. “We had to wait to do any upgrades; we liked the idea of something that is open-sourced, and easy to make many upgrades to without incurring large costs.”

They chose Drupal as their CMS to migrate their site to. One of the biggest challenges in making the switch to Drupal was in Genetic Alliance’s Disease Infosearch section. Disease Infosearch is a tool on the Genetic Alliance site for searching genetic conditions and finding support services for them. The index is updated by over 1,000 different organizations that rely on the simplicity of the updating process in order to make changes to their contact information, research abilities, and organization overviews. Accella had to make sure that this process was kept simple for the users while still taking advantage of the power that Drupal has.

As Genetic Alliance’s current website administrators were familiar with a prior CMS, part of the challenge for Accella was to make sure that the new back-end worked similarly to their existing set-up while either keeping the same number of steps to perform certain functions, or decreasing the number of steps.

In addition to making the new site easy to update and maintain, Genetic Alliance had three main functionalities to address with their site migration:

• Change their payment gateway
• Change the way people updated their disease infosearch information
• Incorporate a MySQL database

Understanding is Key

Genetic Alliance had a design for the new site as well as a general idea of ithe site structure from their existing site. Accella’s main responsibility in updating the site was to translate the design to the Drupal framework and perform all of the coding necessary to make the site function properly. The first step in our development process was to learn as much as possible about Genetic Alliance’s existing processes for maintaining and updating their website.

With such a large number of users and data on the site, we wanted to make sure that transitioning to Drupal would be as seamless as possible for Genetic Alliance with a minimal learning curve if any.

Throughout the development process constant issues arose in migrating from a proprietary CMS to Drupal. With the previous CMS many of the pages functioned properly even though they had either inaccurate or incomplete code. This resulted in having to go through each individual page to make sure that it looked right, had all of the proper code, and all of the content was migrated over; with over 1,000 pages on their site, this process took months to complete.

Accella developed the disease infosearch section to closely resemble Genetic Alliance’s previous interface. This was done to mitigate the amount of training and support calls that Genetic Alliance would have to handle from the 1,000+ network of providers. Now they can upload files, images, videos, links, and other information to share with users about specific genetic conditions.

“We migrated thousands of users, organization and resource items,” said Max Rakhimov, Accella Web Developer. “The most challenging from technical point of view was migration of organization data, because it contained an array of various fields that did not import with existing Drupal modules. A custom migration module successfully transferred all organization data to the new system.”

Their payment gateway has been updated to incorporate PayPal, now donors can easily make payments through an existing PayPal account or via their secure credit card portal.

Technical Information:

Accella has built a new website with Drupal 6 and migrated all data and user accounts from their previous solution that was based on a proprietary CMS (MSSQL/ASP.NET).

As usual, all heavy lifting was done with CCK and Views while a careful selection of contributed modules allowed implementing the entire solution. There is not much custom code for the solution save for a few form_alter and nodeapi hooks as well as a custom search form and some menu definitions. Data migration, on the other hand, required much more custom code because while existing modules (Node Import and Migrate) provided excellent out-of-box migration features for some content, they could not be used for more complex data.

Contributed modules for content management:

• Content modules such as Content Profile, Email, Link, Location, Date, Phone, Jquery Media (for podcasts).
• Content Taxonomy + Multiselect to easily attach disease information to content.
• Image related modules: ImageAPI, ImageField and ImageCache.

Content Search:

• Faceted Search does a very nice job providing a comprehensive search solution.
• Instant Search was used in order not to wait for cron to index content.
• Search Config module for fine-grained tweaking of search settings.

Content presentation:

• Views for navigating organization and disease database.
• Views Slideshow to implement slideshows on front page.
• Panels to render front page sections.
• Views Export from Views Bonus Pack to provide up to date reports in CSV format.

Genetic Alliance’s site has a collection of content types that provide templates for storing data:

• Organization – contains all necessary fields needed to store information about member organizations of Genetic Alliance.
• Resource – contains information about external resources, such as information about diseases and treatments.
• News item – provides a way to easily update news published on front page.
• Profile – contains all necessary user information, such as name, phone number and organization affiliated with.

In the future:

Genetic Alliance is planning to integrate social bookmarking features along with the ability for users to subscribe to RSS feeds. Because the site was designed using Drupal, adding these items to their site will take little programming and can be initiated when Genetic Alliance is ready to move forward without having to rely on an individual developer’s timeline. Down the line, they plan on linking multiple sites to their central database to share information and content, this will be easily accomplished to do as they now pull data from a MySQL database.

“As a smal non-profit that relies on federal funding to support a good portion of our budget, it is often difficual to write in to grants website updates. Being able to rely on a large developer community to create modules and add-ins for our site is big reason for our switch to Drupal.”
-Jim Bialick
Health Information Systems Coordinator
Genetic Alliance

For more information about Genetic Alliance visit their website at www.geneticalliance.org.

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