Case study · Nonprofit
More than a decade behind a national resource for special education.
CADRE is the National Center on Dispute Resolution in Special Education. I started as a contributor in 2015 and became its sole developer, moving the site off Drupal 7 and building a second site for conference registration.
- Client
- CADRE
- Role
- Contributor, then sole developer
- Years
- 2015 to present
- Stack
- Drupal, Drupal Commerce, Solr
The challenge
CADRE's site is a working library for families, educators, and state agencies, with thousands of resources filtered by type, process, and topic. It ran on Drupal 7, which was reaching end of life, and years of growth had left it with far more content types than it needed.
What I did
A complete rebuild in Drupal 9
I rebuilt the site from the ground up in Drupal 9. The audits, technical documentation, architecture, and development were mine, with a front-end developer I brought in for part of the project.
A simpler content model and a rebuilt library
The hardest parts were consolidating an excess of content types into a structure staff can manage, and rebuilding the main library and its Solr search so that thousands of resources stay easy to find.
Conference registration
A second site runs CADRE's conferences, one or two each year. Built on Drupal Commerce, it lets attendees register, log in, see the sessions they signed up for, and get what they need to attend, whether that is a room at the conference center or a Zoom link.
Ongoing ownership
Since the rebuild I have remained CADRE's developer, handling updates, security, and new features as their needs change.
The result
CADRE's library and conferences run on a current, supported platform with a content model its staff can manage. More than a decade in, I am still the developer they call.