Launching Meyer Memorial Trust in Drupal 8

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Meyer Memorial Trust site! Built in Drupal 8, the site demonstrates a true local collaboration between Meyer Memorial Trust, design partner Smith & Connors and Metal Toad.

A new site has been in the works for Meyer since last year when they renewed their mission to "create a flourishing and equitable Oregon."  They sought a design partner to help them communicate their deepened commitment to equity, and found Smith & Connors (S&C) right here in Portland.  When we were first introduced, the Meyer team explained that S&C's proposal stood out because "they just got it". Here at Metal Toad, it was an extra bonus that while S&C is a full-service design firm, they are particularly great at web design and development.  After months of meeting and visioning with Meyer, the result was a clean, beautiful frontend theme built in PatternLab that S&C provided us to integrate with Drupal 8 (more on this integration in future blog posts from our development team).

The heavy lifting began for us in late June, with the frontend design and code nearly complete, it was our turn to make the vision a reality.  While the ongoing limitations of a young Drupal 8 presented a greater degree of complexity and required a lot of problem solving, the result is a robust communication engine for Meyer to highlight their portfolios, funding opportunities, and blog and social media posts.  The following technical components of the site are particularly noteworthy:

• Utilizes Paragraphs and the Metal Toad team contributed to getting the Viewfield to 8.x - Site visitors can access content that is linked to specified authors and topics in different regions of the site.
• GrantIs Award Data Import - Site visitors can filter and search an Awards Database table of all awards Meyer has granted or loaned since 1982.  A pre-filtered view of this database appears on each Portfolio page.  Meyer can import a CSV generated by their GrantIs database through the site's CMS.
• High Resolution Images - The Meyer Communications Team has commissioned and collected beautiful high resolution images of their work across the state.  These images are showcased on the site, and are uploaded and managed using srcset, Focal Point and File Entity Browser.

It was a pleasure to work with an organization that is committed to equity and inclusivity, and is truly bettering our state.  We proudly raise our glasses to toast Meyer and Smith & Connors for a job well done.