I began my position at Western in early 2019 with the goal of transferring the seven Auxiliary Enterprises websites (Fetzer Center, Lawson Ice Arena, Miller Auditorium, West Hills Athletic Club, WMU Pilot Plants, WMU Esports, WMU Oaklands) from Bluehost to Pantheon and providing the department with better online stability and ease of use thanks to Pantheon’s automated backups and multiple development environments.

After consulting our web experts on campus, I wrote a request for proposal with our requirements, refining its focus and scope as presented with new information. The RFP found a successful partner, and with their help, I migrated the sites into Pantheon environments and closed out their hosting on Bluehost.

My task for the remainder of the academic year involved upgrading an as-yet-unlaunched site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 with Composer, and establishing its build process flow and unit testing. I migrated, updated and re-organized the site content, created a new theme based on my coworker’s designs, optimized site graphics and code for page speed and ADA compliance and using Gravity Works’ documentation, set up Continuous Integration testing (Behat, Backstop JS, Lighthouse and Linkcheck, Pa11y) and established a pipeline from local Lando development to the University Bitbucket repositories, through unit testing with Circle CI and into Pantheon’s Dev/Multidev environment.