Thy Kingdom Come, an award winning global prayer campaign, had a new Drupal website built this year. They then needed to move thousands of content items in 6 languages from their old propriety site to the new Open Source one. That’s where we came in!
Table of Contents
Testing the New Site
Before we started moving content we product tested the website. We were very impressed with Big Blue Door who had built the site, but there are always issues with any build. We found and reported 75 issues for both the desktop and mobile versions of the site.
We worked with Big Blue Door to prioritise the issues, then specified fixes when needed. Then we tested the fixes and gave feedback if more work was needed.
Specifications
We specified new features for the website to resolve emerging issues. For example, a new automated Videos page that displays videos from elsewhere on the site.
Another example is the full width responsive video embed needed for when videos must be placed within text, or where there are multiple videos.
A final example is the “Translated by Google” warning on pages translated automatically by the tool Big Blue Door Built.
Negotiations
I also spent a lot of time working as an intermediary between the site developers and Thy Kingdom Come staff. This helped ensure Thy Kingdom Come achieved their usability and appearance aims with minimal core staff time allocated to the project.
The most complex task was getting the map on the Light Up The World page, which shows user pledges, to have an attractive number and style of stars while still being usable.
This map is key to the social media strategy of Thy Kingdom Come, as each user who pledges is encouraged to share their pledge online via email, Facebook or twitter.
Once we were happy that no bugs would cause us to backtrack, we started on the content move.
The Move
Over about a month we moved 1500 items from the old proprietary TKC site to the new Drupal site, including:
- 16 main pages, 58 Stories, 75 resources and 75 video resources (English)
- 300 translations of pages in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Swahili
- 870 translated text snippets, form items and CTA buttons
- We also created 130 formerly untranslated pages, using a translation tool
The most challenging thing was finding/identifying all the content, as much of the content was hard to find on the old site. Eventually I worked from a sizeable data-dump, plus ran a line by line manual download sprint from the old site. This data was then organised into a series of folders.
Within each of the folders we created plain text copies of each content item in each language.
Each text file had listed in it the images and pdf’s required for this resource, which we had accessed, via the data dump.
As we uploaded the items to the new site we entered each item into a huge spreadsheet with all the translations and logged any errors which were either fixed, or reported on.
Testing the App & Other Tasks
Along side the website work we also product tested the Android app and sent feedback to the developers. We found 21 bugs and tested the fixes.
We also removed the title slates from the end of 60 YouTube videos as the wrong dates were on the videos from previous years (because Pentecost is a movable feast).
Finally we built the email campaigns and auto-posting blog articles for each day of the campaign and subtitled Pope Francis – both are discussed here.
