Four Kitchens
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Launch announcement: American Craft Council

3 Min. ReadClient stories

We’re happy to announce the launch of the new American Craft Council website, and our first major Drupal 8 development project! The site launched in late July 2016 with enough time to be in place and guide audiences through the final craft show of the 2016 season in San Francisco.

Cultivating a Culture of Making

The American Craft Council is a nonprofit organization that champions craft through preservation, cultivation, and celebration. Through its magazine, library, events, and digital and paper archives, it has supported professional “makers” for over 75 years.

The American Craft Council (ACC) wanted to replace its aging Drupal 7 site with a sharp-looking, mobile-first, cleanly architected, and future-ready website built in Drupal 8. The ACC team was eager to embrace improvements in editorial workflow, information architecture, and media management to replace highly manual and labor intensive processes. Finally, ACC wanted to better relate and expose their existing articles, blogs, and news, thereby encouraging site visitors to explore the wealth of resources for lovers and makers of craft.

Moving to Drupal 8

Four Kitchens worked with ACC to replace their ad hoc Drupal 7 content model with an information architecture and semantic content model that represents the American Craft Council magazine, events, staff, and information archive. Armed with this refined structure, Four Kitchens created a mobile-first design and a new visual identity and page architecture.

Four Kitchens migrated ACC’s article, blogs, resources, users, and media assets from their Drupal 7 content model into the new and improved content model in Drupal 8. Old content was transformed by creating new and meaningful relationships among assets, refining and simplifying for a manageable series of interests.

Using the fantastic editorial experience that Drupal 8 brings, Four Kitchens further enhanced existing workflows with improved media management, attribution, and utilization through contributed and custom modules. Context-sensitive page elements reduce the need for duplicate content, menus, and configuration and provide a more maintainable and cleaner implementation that honors the way ACC produces digital assets and runs their organization.

Screenshot of the American Craft Council website. On the left there is an article about a bird-shaped lamp. On the right, there is a small column of text about joining the American Craft Council.

Engineering Specifics

The American Craft Council is the first of many Drupal 8 websites that we are producing for our clients. As part of the overall effort to deliver high quality sites in the latest version of the Drupal platform, we have contributed to community efforts, issue queues, code patches to contrib and core, as well as improvements to the Aquifer build tool for Drupal 8.

  • Drupal 8 site extended with contrib and custom modules
  • panels-and-page-manager layout utilizing custom contexts
  • config-based build utilizing Drupal 8 improvements to Aquifer, GitHub, CircleCI, Pantheon, and Pantheon’s CLI tool, Terminus
  • migration of content and media from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, with additional migrations from CSV files
  • embeddable rich media library using Drupal 8’s media entity, media entity browser, entity embed, and media entity solutions
  • custom caching work to improve backend performance
  • custom menu work to improve navigation and output of the Drupal 8 menu module
  • custom Twig templates and templating suggestions that work with entity view modes, fences, and field groups

The Team

Along with the web team at ACC: Eric Gjerde, Elizabeth Ryan, and Andrew Ranallo.