New Drupal solution developed for SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory by Propeople Drupal Agency

PRLog (Press Release) - Dec. 2, 2013 - SAN JOSE, Calif. -- SLAC has just launched its new redesigned website which comes with a highly flexible layout, responsive design that can be displayed on a range of devices, and a powerful Drupal 7 platform. The design maximizes the information visitors can receive quickly without having to navigate throughout the site.

To achieve this, the Propeople Drupal Agency (http://wearepropeople.com) utilized “zen grid” system to define columns in the given design and allowed flexible responsive breakpoint and management of internal site stylesheets. Propeople also employed latest website styling technologies such as SASS, CSS media query in the design implementation process.

Propeople migrate to Drupal 7 the SLAC’s old website. The site has been powered by an outdated proprietary CMS system. The migration was performed without changing existing site contents and information architecture. The majority of the effort was focused on usability improvements, workflow improvement and responsive design (http://wearepropeople.com/blog/the-best-responsive-web-de...).

Propeople chose to use Aegir as the main provisioning tool. Aegir is an open source Drupal distribution that is designed to install and manage thousands of Drupal sites (http://wearepropeople.com/clients) on any number of servers. Each provisioned site is installed from an installation profile. Drupal 7 ships with two default profiles, Standard and Minimal. For this project, we also built a number of additional installation profiles that were specific to SLAC’s requirements.

One of the requirements from the SLAC security team is that all Drupal accounts should be centrally managed. We decided to use their Active Directory installation to manage access. Every time a site is created within Aegir, it has a unique numeric ID assigned to it. To manage access for the site, we have created Active Directory security groups for each user role.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory built the world’s longest particle accelerator, discovered some of the fundamental building blocks of matter and created the first website in North America. Today SLAC is one of the largest nationally recognized laboratory with more than 1,600 full time scientists.

Read the full case study (http://wearepropeople.com/clients/slac) to find out more about SLAC’s new website.