Employer: University of Cambridge
Date: 2013-2025
Tools: Drupal
Category: Website Design
Project: Design and build a Drupal site as the online home of several decades of climate change research, including more than 600 unique nodes, several books and manuals, more than 20 long-form reports, 200 journal papers and multiple videos, articles and other content
Result: A well-structured, intuitive catalogue of research publications, designed, built and managed using Drupal 7 and 10 from 2013 until 2025.
The Use Less Group is the public-facing site for a world-leading climate research centre. As well as building and managing the site, I provided training to close colleagues and other internal staff on content management and best practices for design and publication. I focused on publishing many shorter reports (up to 100 pages) as downloadable pdfs, organised using the Views module. I used the same type of Drupal structuring for academic journal papers, but used a complex arrangement of back-referencing to link back to author biographies and related content.
Thousands of Pages of Publications
For complicated content structures, guidelines and books, I created online versions within Drupal to compliment the printed designs, structured with contents pages, subsections with hierarchy, and hyperlinks throughout for easy navigation. In this longform example, I gave the nodes their own content types with taxonomy and entity referencing to build menu hierarchy on the left. I made the referencing to figures within the text clickable, with the figure appearing as a Lightbox popout, ensuring that the graphics remained linked to the relevant text, and were shown in a way which was intuitive to an academic audience familiar with online journals.
I used Views, Blocks and back-referencing to build the whole book, and link it to other related papers and articles.
Drupal is by far the best tool for this type of publication as it can be structured so the user has an intuitive journey, while my role as the designer and content manager is simplified with robust foundational use of content types, views, blocks and reference fields.