The Challenge
The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) manages wildlife resources and engages the public through its website with information on hunting, fishing, and land management. To support ongoing website updates, the state selected GovWebworks as a pre-qualified vendor. Under this contract, GovWebworks was enlisted to modernize the Teacher Portal and Research Portal with a Drupal 10 base theme, as well as build out new features and functionality.
The Teacher Portal provides Missouri educators with resources for teaching about the state’s ecology and conservation. Information includes curriculum guides and student materials, information on the Missouri National Archery in the Schools Program, hunter education and firearms safety, grant opportunities, free teacher workshops, and other conservation-related classroom resources. The Research Portal is a hub for information on Missouri conservation research projects such as monitoring of tree, bat, fish, elk, and eagle populations and evaluating the impacts of agricultural chemicals.
Our Approach
The project involved theming, migrating data, setting up data management automations, and creating views and dashboards for staff and teachers. To start, we created a reusable Drupal base theme for the new portals that emulated the main MDC site in order to ensure consistency for visitors navigating from the main site to the portals. The GWW team then migrated existing forms, users, taxonomies, and content from the old site to the new one. We enhanced workshop creation and registration functionalities, updated data management automations and rules to Drupal 10, and created necessary views and dashboards for staff. All functionalities were tested in a QA environment before deployment. Likewise, the Research Portal was developed with the same base theme to provide a similar resource for tracking research projects. Daily stand-ups and weekly meetings fostered collaboration between the GWW and MDC teams.
The Result
The upgraded Teacher Portal and new Research Portal have a consistent look and feel with the main MDC site. They also benefit from improved functionalities for content management and enhanced data management processes. With the migration of content and users, the new views and dashboards provide staff with the necessary tools to accomplish tasks efficiently. The updates ensure a seamless transition between the sites and a better user experience for staff, educators, and researchers.
