The decision on what content management system we’ll use for the new website, is a really exciting one for us in the product team. We work with the CMS every day and support users from around the organisation to use it too, so when it came to scoping out and seeing what one would work best for us for this project.. it was a really important decision to make.

What is it? 

I may be getting a bit techy here, so I’ll explain what a Content Management System (CMS) is before I geek out about the process and decisions we’ve made further in this post. A CMS is the back end to the website, the place where you can manage and edit the content, and it has some powerful parts for you to manage templates, who can access the website and what permissions they can have etc.  

We currently use Drupal but we’ve got an older version of Drupal which is one of the main reasons that we’re taking on this digital unification project as it soon will no longer be supported which presents a big risk. There are lots of great things that our current system can do but we’ve identified things that it can do better for us in the product team, for website users in the organisation and to the improve experience for our website visitors too.  

What about the new website? 

The project team looked around to see what CMS solutions would be meet our requirements, and worked really closed with the tech team at TPX Impact on narrowing down some platforms that would be great for us. After calls, demos and matrix tables, it was narrowed down to Drupal 10 (this is a much newer release than what we currently use) and Umbraco. Umbraco would be a new solution to the charity but members in the Digital Product team knew it well especially Lucy as she led on the project to build a website using a Umbraco CMS for Mind. 

The team had a demo of both platforms and the tech teams answered our endless list of questions about each one so we could make a fair comparision and come to a conclusion on picking a CMS that ticked all of our boxes and would suit us all best.  

We all jointly decided after the extensive demo of the platform and looking at websites that are using it, that Umbraco would work well for us and would be a great choice for this project. 

What’s next? 

Now the decision has been made, we will continue with the tech teams at TPX Impact to learn everything we need about Umbraco and they’ll start to build the solution for us alongside our roadmap. 

We’re really excited about this decision and change in platform, and happy that we’ll be able to work with our Digital Champions on this platform and show them all the great things about it.