With Drupal 9, the CMS is Entering a New Era of Possibilities

Drupal 9 is offering fantastic CMS solutions for content management, collaboration, and agility. Learn more about how digital product agency and Pantheon partner Phase2 uses this technology to its full potential.

With Drupal 9, Phase2 is building solutions that enable their internal team and clients to update content across their digital properties seamlessly — all without requiring the technical expertise of their developers. 

Drupal 9 has enabled the Phase2 team to respond quickly to topics the marketplace is most interested in with its user-friendly nature for performing content updates.

“Drupal 9 allows our marketing team to publish new landing pages and other content without any constraints or a need for development resources. It allows us to take a multichannel approach to our campaigns that we haven’t had in previous iterations.”

- Chris Jorgenson, Marketing Director, Phase2

Overcoming Previous Pain Points of Drupal 

When Jorgenson joined Phase2, the website was running on Drupal 8. From a front-end perspective, it checked all the boxes, but from a backend and content administration perspective, it didn’t meet all of their marketing needs. 

“Our Drupal 8 site that launched in 2017 did not leverage Layout Builder, so the editorial experience was a bit cumbersome and almost always required collaboration with our front-end developers to make even small content revisions.”

The team began looking for a CMS solution that would enable the marketing team to make updates to the website without a developer. After evaluating most of the popular CMSs, they landed back on Drupal. 

There’s a widely held belief that Drupal is great for developers but isn't friendly to content editors and marketers, but Drupal 9 has changed all of that. With Drupal 9, the open-source CMS has not only matched its competition’s ease of use for a non-technical audience, it has surpassed it. 

Interested in supercharging your content and marketing teams' ability to create web pages by upgrading to Drupal 9 — all without requiring the resources of your development team? Sign up for this webinar to learn more. 

Implementing a Design System, Protecting A New Brand

Around the same time that Phase2 was making the transition to Drupal 9, the agency also undertook a rebrand. That meant a complete overhaul of the look and feel of their website, along with new messaging to accompany that visual change. They also decided to integrate their proprietary design system, Particle, into the website’s front end. 

“All of our Drupal sites use an in-browser pattern library system to ensure web designs are documented and ready for development. Using this approach creates a living style guide and a set of components designed to scale and grow over time. It is also incredibly valuable for brand safety,” said Jorgenson. 

Incorporating design system methodologies into the site’s front end allowed not just the more technically minded folks to come in and make updates, but it enabled any team member to design pages that were new to brand guidelines. 

For Phase2 and any organization that uses Drupal 9, future migrations to the latest Drupal versions will now be possible without the need for a total rebuild. This is a tremendous leap for Drupal, as previous versions did not offer an upgrade path.

A New Era for Content Marketers on Drupal 

Drupal 9 gives marketing teams the ability to make changes quickly and easily, allowing them to conduct more A/B testing, deploy landing pages quickly, and update messaging where it will have the most impact. It helped Phase2 implement a WebOps framework and run their website more smoothly in an agile fashion, along with those of their clients.

“It's kind of like night and day where we were and where we are now,” said Jorgenson. “There's basically nothing on this site that I can't manipulate without a developer. That flexibility, that nimbleness - that's really the biggest win.” 

Tim Lehnen from the Drupal Association summed up the Drupal 9 capabilities best. 

The Drupal project has a history of being on the leading edge of technical innovation but at the cost of being difficult for editorial users to manage. With Drupal 9 and beyond, the project is focusing on empowering those users to access the full power of what Drupal offers.”

- Tim Lehnen, CTO, the Drupal Association

Learn more about upgrading to Drupal 9, and how this latest CMS changes everything for content and marketing teams looking to create powerful web pages by signing up for this webinar.