The document summarizes the changes made in revamping the AIMS website. Key changes included moving to Drupal 7 for improved flexibility and content management, migrating existing content using the Feeds and Migrate modules, reorganizing taxonomy terms and filters for better browsing of topics, integrating external repositories of data and media, and improving the user experience, mobile responsiveness, and search engine optimization. The revamp has led to doubled search engine results and sets the stage for further semantic markup and social media integration going forward.

1. October 6, 2014
AIMS website revamp
www.macaronibros.com

2. Why Drupal 7
• Entity API
With this Drupal 7 module we have the ability to easily define references between contents pushing the
old taxonomy module to a new level of flexibility.
• Field collections
Defining complex data structures is not a problem anymore since we can now define set of fields that can
be reused and nested on any content type.
• Display Suite
With display suite we are able to standardize contents display depending on context improving
maintainability and flexibility.
• Panels
This module, in combination with our “Tree panels” module, offers full flexibility on the page layout
structure giving us fine control on markup, avoiding unnecessary HTML tags and thus producing
semantic markup that highly improves SEO performance.
• Foundation + SASS
The new theme layer in combination with the Foundation Framework and the SASS engine provides full
flexibility and a good starting point to develop our custom themes.

3. The migration process
Feeds module!
This module has been used to migrate all the Vest Registry giving us the ability to
work live on the new website data structure without affecting the migration
procedure.
!
Migrate module!
The Migrate framework has been used to migrate all the existing contents.
We developed a custom module, extending the framework base classes, that defines
a mapping procedure.
Thanks to this module we made the huge work of migrating contents clean but also
repeatable.
Since the procedure was hard coded we removed the need of freezing the old website
during migration: we worked on a backup once everything was ready we re-launched
the procedure to migrate all of the new contents.

4. Browse by Areas of interest
The old “Subject Tags” taxonomy vocabulary has been
reorganized in three main areas to allow better focus
on topics.

5. Filter by topic
The new “Areas of interests” vocabulary has been
integrated in each key page by means of a “Filter
by topic” widget that improves the user experience
allowing for fast filtering based on specific topics.

6. The Vest Registry
To highlight AIMS core business all Vest Registry products have been transformed to taxonomy
terms, improving overall visibility and making content editing and tagging more flexible.
Now any content type can be tagged with any Vest registry item, creating a strong relationship
that helps to navigate the website keeping the related AIMS products highlighted on each page.

7. External repositories
The website is seamlessly integrated
• Datasets from CIARD ring
• Organizations from CIARD ring
• RDF Geopolitical Ontology
• Videos from Youtube
• Presentations from Slideshare
• Publications from ELIS
• News and Blog posts from CIARD

8. AIMS and CIARD affiliation

9. Better user experience
We designed the UI to improve the user experience.
Using HTML mockups we allowed the AIMS team to
review the UI and get updates quickly.
Contributing is now much easier, with the “Post”
button always visible on the website header.

10. User subscriptions
The notification system
has been improved.
The user personal page
has now a “Manage my
subscriptions” button
where you can easily
subscribe/unsubscribe
to any topic of your
interest with just a
click.

11. Mobile
With the use of “Foundation
Framework” the AIMS website is
now responsive and optimized for
any kind of mobile device.

12. Search engine results
We are now monitoring the
website with google
webmaster tools and we can
observe how the website
presence on search engines
has doubled in a few days after
the revamp launch.

13. Next steps
• Take semantic markup to the next level with
schema.org
• Enrich integration and rendering of Geopolitical
Ontology tagged data
• Closer integration with social media, e.g. login with
Facebook, Twitter, Google

14. Thanks!
we !ok forw#d
to new cHaLLenges
with
the aims team!