Managing complex content for a national ONLUS with Drupal 9

The Casa di Carità Arti e Mestieri Onlus Foundation is an historic nonprofit organization whose purpose is the education and professional, human, cultural, social and spiritual promotion of people. It is headquartered in Turin, and has 13 operating offices located in Piedmont, Sardinia, and Veneto.
 

The first courses in Turin began in 1920, more than a century ago: thousands of young people have learned a trade in the classrooms and workshops of the Casa di Carità.

Historic companies, such as Lancia and Michelin, entrusted to the Casa di Carità the training of their skilled workers.

In its 100-year history, the institute has grown and become more and more structured in the territory; today it is an important national entity, with more than 5,000 students per training year.

Today the Foundation has about 250 employees and its Board of Directors is appointed by the Archbishop of Turin, Ucid, Unione Cristiana Imprenditori Dirigenti, and the Central Training School.

The new website in Drupal 9  

The Foundation's website had been built about 10 years ago using Drupal 7, a Content Management System (CMS) close to end-of-life, and now needed some structural changes and a set of user and content management features that would seamlessly integrate with the school's multi-location structure. In fact, each location, in publishing its educational offerings, managing enrollments and job openings, must be able to perform a number of activities within a perimeter defined by the headquarters.

Most of the content and all the taxonomies on the current website were migrated to a new Drupal 9 CMS, making it well positioned on a number of keywords that are particularly relevant to the sector in which it operates.

The project was carried out in collaboration with the Turin-based communication firm Arcastudio, which handled the graphic design.

The management of training courses  

The site is based on a multi-domain structure where each Foundation location has been assigned a sub-domain on which to publish specific content (news, courses, photo gallery). 
Thanks to Drupal's features for managing permissions and user roles, platform administrators can supervise the activities carried out by site managers, whether it is publishing content on the sub-domains, managing enrollments for a training course, or entering and approving job offers.

Training courses are another important focus of the project, as the Foundation's core business. With the new site developed in Drupal 9, administrators can set up the global course catalog, and location managers can choose which ones to activate at the relevant location, calendaring and customizing them with additional information, lecturers, etc., and finally archiving them in an automated way at the end of the training year. This meets the dual need of managing a large amount of content and maintaining a history of courses delivered in past years, all while complying with SEO.

Methods to improve the fruition of content​​​​​​​

Precisely because of the large number of courses and job offers that Casa di Carità makes available to its users, it was necessary to improve the fruition of this content on the website. Tools such as Search API and Facets were the natural choice for creating navigation pages of the training offerings that allows users to find the desired content based on a text search or selection of different filters.

Autonomy in page composition

The Gutenberg visual composer was also enabled for this project, which, thanks to its simple graphical interface, allows the Foundation's communication managers to create new pages of the site with the desired layout in complete autonomy. The provision of a number of custom templates makes it possible to quickly create pages, consistent with the UX and layout of the rest of the site without having technical knowledge.

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