We led a rebuild and redesign of Free Press’ Drupal website to modernize its codebase, expand its storytelling features, and refresh its design system.

Filmed at the AI Summit at London Tech Week 2025, this two-minute video captures the passion and purpose behind the newly-launched Drupal AI Strategic Initiative.

Join Baddý and Jamie as they explain why this work is important and why we need the Drupal community to rally behind it.

“In order to get fast innovation in Drupal AI, we need people to work on the project—and we’re doing that by getting funding and full-time contributors from participating companies.”

— Baddý Sonja Breidert

“I’ve never seen something quite like this in the Drupal community… It’s coordinated innovation not for one company, but for the whole open source community.”

— Jamie Abrahams

The Web Chefs

January 1, 1970

Highlights

• Consolidated nearly 300 legacy websites into a single, cohesive Drupal-powered platform.
• Achieved outstanding performance scores, including Lighthouse scores as high as 99 and an exceptionally fast homepage (FCP of 0.5 seconds).
• Implemented sophisticated, easy-to-use authoring tools, empowering 130+ content creators.
• Enhanced accessibility and SEO to ensure NDSU’s content reaches and resonates with more students.

NDSU’s engaging, new digital experience

We’re thrilled to announce that North Dakota State University has officially launched the new NDSU.edu — a dynamic platform designed to attract, engage, and inspire prospective students.

Facing a rapidly changing digital landscape, North Dakota State University took a bold step to revolutionize its online presence. By investing in a transformative digital platform, NDSU has solidified itself as a forward-thinking leader committed to delivering an outstanding, cohesive experience for prospective students.

North Dakota State University

We now have an amazing authoring experience and an engaging web presence that reflects the vibrancy of the NDSU community.

—Lindsay Condry, Web Manager

Empowering editors with sophisticated, user-friendly tools

The editing experience developed for NDSU is among the most sophisticated and user-friendly we’ve ever created. Using Drupal’s Layout Paragraphs module, editors can effortlessly design dynamic content layouts using intuitive drag-and-drop tools, enjoying real-time visual previews and hundreds of flexible layout combinations — giving them unprecedented control, speed, and confidence in content management.

Community-led transformation

At the heart of NDSU’s digital transformation was the innovative “Web Principals” initiative. These campus-wide champions didn’t just adopt new technology — they actively shaped its success by facilitating collaboration, peer-to-peer support, and fostering a genuine sense of community ownership. We also provided extensive training on a variety of topics — everything from page layout to writing effective copy for the web  — during live office hours and in a publicly available knowledge base. This unique approach not only smoothed the transition but ensured long-term success and sustainability by “training the trainers,” ultimately building a team of more than 130 content creators across campus.

Four Kitchens

The Web Principals became our change leaders. They’re the power users and the first line of support, making sure knowledge spreads across campus.

—Megan Bygness Bradley, Technical Project Manager

More engaging program discovery

Prospective students now engage with academic offerings in an entirely new way through NDSU’s visually immersive, Netflix-style program finder. Organized by compelling themes such as ‘Pursue a Career with Purpose,’ this innovative approach makes program discovery intuitive and enjoyable, directly supporting students in finding their ideal academic path.

Migrating hundreds of sites — with some help from AI

We engineered a custom migration strategy that consolidated nearly 300 TYPO3 sites — plus a couple of legacy Drupal sites — into a single, flexible Drupal platform. To modernize the frontend, we used AI-enhanced coding tools to convert two outdated Angular applications into lean, vanilla JavaScript, saving considerable time and complexity and reducing long-term technical debt.

Four Kitchens

AI helped us unravel messy Angular apps, turning them into clear, documented code that saved hours of guesswork.

—Jim Vomero, Senior Engineer

Results

• Unified brand identity: Transitioned nearly 300 disparate sites into a unified brand experience — “One NDSU, One Voice” — strengthening NDSU’s identity and clarity of messaging across all digital touchpoints.
• Editor empowerment and efficiency: Implemented advanced, user-friendly authoring tools, dramatically reducing content publishing time, minimizing training, and increasing editor confidence.
• Community engagement and ownership: Successfully trained more than 130 content editors campus-wide through a unique “Web Principals” initiative, creating an active community of empowered, knowledgeable users committed to continuous improvement.
• Speed and performance: With Lighthouse scores as high as 99 on internal pages and a homepage loading in half a second, visitors experience incredibly smooth, fast interactions — improving engagement and reducing bounce rates.
• Significant accessibility and SEO improvements: Achieved near-perfect accessibility and SEO scores, ensuring inclusivity, compliance, and maximized online visibility to attract more prospective students.

Our partnership continues

This launch isn’t the end — it’s just the beginning! As NDSU’s digital partner, our Continuous Care support program will constantly improve their platform, ensuring it remains flexible, secure, and ready to adapt to future needs.

Congratulations to the entire NDSU team! Explore their impressive new site at NDSU.edu.

Is your school’s web platform ready for an overhaul? Let’s talk!

The post Launch announcement: North Dakota State University’s new digital platform appeared first on Four Kitchens.

Among the latest Drupal innovations, one stands out as especially bold, ambitious, and full of promise: a new version of Drupal designed to bring the power of the platform to non-developers. Known as Drupal CMS — and previously codenamed “Starshot” — it’s earning plenty of well-deserved attention.

Approach – from print to digital

Digitizing a print format usually brings new opportunities and challenges. The biggest advantage is greater flexibility. Thanks to digitization, facts & figures can now be continuously updated and distributed more easily. In collaboration with the design agency Usable Brands, we reinterpreted existing visualizations from the print medium for the digital, responsive format. A key challenge here was to generalize possible exceptions and find reusable components that could cover as many cases as possible.

In iterative steps, we supplemented the design process with a digital prototype in order to test and improve the real experience in the digital world.

Data, data, data

One challenge was that the final data was not yet available during development. We were able to test the visualizations with test data from previous years, but clarity about the requirements only developed in the course of the project, as the data was delivered and processed.

Responsive design for interactive charts

We paid particular attention to ensuring that the solution could be scaled as data changed and that editors could customize the display of data within the CI/CD framework.

Since both data and the size of users' devices can vary, we developed solutions that optimize the charts for smartphones first, but also for desktop devices. For very small datasets, we do not use labels and only display them when interacted with. Labels for rows appear above the row on mobile devices, while on desktop devices we use the available space and display the row labels directly at the beginning of the row. Particularly long line charts are made accessible on mobile devices by horizontal scrolling, while on desktop devices the chart can be displayed in its entirety. The donut charts benefit from the fact that we scale the labels according to the size of the pie slice – small values are displayed with smaller labels and larger values with larger labels.

Result

You can visit Fakten und Zahlen at the pharmaSuisse website.

Below are some examples of how the facts and figures were visualized:

Editorial experience

To support design and preparation as efficiently as possible, we have expanded the blökkli editor to include chart functions. First, the data is uploaded in a structured form, e.g. as a CSV file.

In a second step, the editorial team can interactively prepare the structured data in blökkli. The selection of predefined color palettes and sliders for settings help to optimally adjust the positioning and display.

Charts can also be exported as PDF files. Editors can manually set line breaks to optimize the layout of the chart pages.

Outlook

The interactive charts for pharmaSuisse have been successfully released and are continuously updated. pharmaSuisse benefits in that facts can be sent directly via digital channels and updated regularly. We are currently planning the second iteration: the presentation of facts will be optimized, with a focus on interactions and readability.

Many thanks to pharmaSuisse for their trust and cooperation. Thank you Usable Brands as well as Jan Hug and Jens Vranckz from our team for the implementation! We are delighted to be able to create and further develop an appealing visualization for facts and figures.

Join Mike Miles and Aubrey Sambor as they discuss their experiences with public speaking at tech conferences, including the challenges and joys of presenting technical and big-picture talks. Dive into their personal summer plans, ranging from trips to Cape Cod and Asheville to beer festivals and camping adventures. The conversation also explores recent technology updates, such as Figma's site builder and Apple's new 'Liquid Glass' design, emphasizing the importance of accessibility. Tune in for a casual, insightful chat about professional growth, summer fun, and the ever-evolving tech landscape.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe005

Mike is passionate about development and working with the latest open source technologies. He has been working in web engineering since 2003, utilizing a number of different technologies, languages and frameworks. He has been working with Drupal since 2008 and is a regular contributor to the community and project. From 2015 to 2024 he was the lead organizer of the Boston Drupal Meetup Group. Since 2017 has been one of the organizers of New England Drupal Camp.

In his day-to-day role as Director of Web Development at MIT Sloan, Mike leads the development, maintenance and growth of the digital properties for the school, as well as, the development team that supports them. He is a public speaker and regularly presents at technical conferences around the world. Since 2013 Mike has presented dozens of talks at many different conferences/camps across the globe.

Aubrey is a lead front end developer and accessibility advocate with over 19 years of experience in software development and leadership. She specializes in writing modern CSS, semantic HTML, and performant JavaScript and brings almost two decades of experience in web development across higher education, non-profits, and public sector projects.

Aubrey is an active member of the Drupal community, contributing to open source initiatives and speaking at regional and national conferences. She champions accessibility best practices and writes about front end development, music reviews, and knitting projects on her blog, aubreysambor.com.

When she's not coding, Aubrey enjoys running, spinning her own yarn, fountain pens, and exploring local coffee shops and breweries.

• Casual Conversation and Weather
• Fitness Routines and Treadmills
• Podcast Preferences
• Remote Work and Buffer Time
• Job Search and Conference Experience
• Travel Stories and Conference Talks
• Halloween and Conference Talks
• Evolving as a Speaker
• Technical vs. Idea-Driven Talks
• Managing Bugs and Building Trust
• Balancing Multiple Talks
• Figma Sites and Accessibility Concerns
• Apple's Liquid Glass Design
• Nostalgia for Old Tech
• Summer Plans and Conferences

Mike Miles - mike-miles.com mikemiles86 Aubrey Sambor - aubreysambor.com starshaped

One of the many benefits of the Tag1 D7ES service is that we notify you of any updates and provide security patches for all contrib and core modules you use - including free compatibility updates for Apache Solr! Apache Solr is a widely-used, open-source search platform that provides indexing, faceted search, and other features above and beyond plain-text string matching. Only version 9.x is currently supported by the community, with previous versions declared end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receiving security support. Two Solr integration modules for Drupal 7 (D7) saw wide usage, Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr. As of Drupal 7 EOL, these modules only supported Solr through version 7.x, meaning the D7 sites that wanted to continue using Solr were forced to use these older, unsupported versions. Hosting providers for D7 sites also needed to maintain outdated infrastructure for their customers. ## Tag1 D7ES updates Solr support Tag1 recently released updates to the Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr modules for all Tag1 D7ES customers, with support for Apache Solr versions 8.x and 9.x. This allows D7 sites to utilize Solr’s major improvements, including * Improved security * Improved stability * Improved scalability * Improved logging...

A long while back, security researcher Sam Mortenson reported a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Drupal core's Link module. Essentially, the options property on link fields was not being properly sanitized. This meant cross-site scripting was possible under some circumstances -- and, as always for cross-site scripting, we were concerned that the XSS could be combined with other attacks and escalated to more serious exploits.