Better Care Network (BCN) is an international network of organizations committed to supporting children without adequate family care around the world. BCN works by fostering collaboration, research and information sharing on family strengthening and alternative care, and advocating for changes to national, regional, and global policies to improve children's care situations. BCN is a fiscally sponsored project of Tides Center, the USA's largest fiscal sponsor.
https://bettercarenetwork.org is the main website for BCN. It was built on Drupal 7, it is serving around 20K page views to around 8K visitors each month. Drupal 7 is reaching end-of-life in November 2021, and meanwhile a number of new initiatives and enhancements are being planned. Instead of building on a platform that is going to be obsolete soon, we planned to upgrade the site to Drupal 8, while incorporating the first of these improvements -- an advanced faceted search using Apache Solr -- for this project.
- The primary goal for this project was to update the site to Drupal 8, and put it on a firm foundation for at least the next decade. This will:
- Save development costs by doing necessary upgrading beforehand, so new development won't need to be done twice
- Give us an opportunity to bring content creation more in line with industry best-practices, simplifying the content creation process and making it easier to do things like enhance event management and job opportunities
Enhance search by incorporating the Solr search engine
The next project was to include some rich "Puzzle" animated landing pages to make visiting the site more remarkable, more likely to get shared.
Measure of success for this phase of the project was primarily to upgrade the site to Drupal 8, clean up the content types to make future improvements far more straightforward, and provide enhanced search. It will be considered complete when:
- The new Drupal 8 site is live with all content from the current site.
- Page creation is simpler -- instead of having a very complex form for editing a piece of content, break this out into several clear types with greatly simpler editing forms
- End users can find items on the site even using misspelled search terms, and more easily filter results across several dimensions (facets)
