Beyond the Build with Gilder Lehrman – Hamilton & the Drupal Association

July 09, 2025 | 38 minutes

Andrew Williamson Senior Project Manager

Nicholas Gliserman from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History shares the story behind the Hamilton Education Program and how Drupal helped bring it to classrooms across the country.

The Hamilton Education Program started as a collaborative effort between Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to use the musical “Hamilton” as a vehicle for educational enrichment, bringing history alive for young audiences through the arts.

The website integrates American history education with the arts by allowing high school students to experience the musical and delve into its history; teachers and students are encouraged to conduct research using the website’s resources.

The previous Hamilton site was built in Drupal 7, which was outdated and becoming increasingly rigid. Editors had a tough time updating content and didn’t have the flexibility of a more modern version of Drupal to create visually appealing pages for their audiences, while teachers had difficulty managing their students.

It was time to redesign and rebuild with Kanopi Studios. This webinar covers the process.

Drupal Recipes and CKEditor

June 11, 2025 | 46 minutes

Kerry Murphy Engineering Manager

Watch Video

In this webinar, we’ll share the latest from the Drupal and CKEditor universes, showcasing how your content team can benefit from the latest improvements in both products.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

What are Drupal Recipes, and how do they improve the lives of both Drupal developers and content creators
What are the latest features that landed in the CKEditor Drupal Plugin Pack module
How to combine these latest updates to improve your Drupal content workflows and focus on delivering quality content at high velocity

Who should attend?
Content managers, product managers, Drupal developers, and teams looking to improve their content workflows

Speakers:

Martin Anderson-Clutz – Senior Solutions Engineer at Acquia

Marcin Dusza – Senior Product Manager at CKEditor

Will Jackson – Drupal Technical Lead at Kanopi Studios

Kerry Murphy – Engineering Manager at Kanopi Studios

Marvin J. Cortés – Senior Engineer at Four Kitchens

Hosted by Wojtek Cichon – Senior Product Marketing Manager at CKEditor

Beyond the Build with Exploratorium & the Drupal Association

April 18, 2024 | 30 minutes

Tim Tufts Director of Project Success

Drupal Association

This “Beyond the Build” conversation features George Perry (Exploratorium) and the Kanopi team discussing a multi-year modernization effort that moved one of the web’s oldest sites forward while preserving decades of content.

Who’s involved

George Perry, Manager of the Online Media Group (part of the Media Studio dept.) at the Exploratorium.
Kanopi team of Tim Tufts and Jim Birch, supporting strategy, architecture, design, and development.

Context: a truly historic website

Exploratorium’s site was originally exploratorium.edu and they describe it as one of the first ~600 websites on the internet.
The organization has tens of thousands of pages, many created across multiple eras (hand-coded HTML, older tools, then Drupal).
A key theme: preserving a massive “online legacy” while making the platform maintainable.

Why Drupal for Exploratorium

George frames Drupal as a fit for their reality:

Scale + complexity: tens of thousands of pages, many programs, and long-lived initiatives.
Many editors + permissions: needs role-based, multi-editor publishing.
Flexible data model: better suited than WordPress for their volume and content structure.
Editor experience + SEO: they chose to keep Drupal as both content system and front-end (rather than headless React/Gatsby).
Open-source alignment: strong preference for open source and contributing back.

The engagement: Drupal 7 → Drupal 8 plan, delivered on Drupal 9

Kanopi was initially brought in to:

Create a blueprint + roadmap to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 (at the time).

But by the time the work landed:

The implementation ultimately moved to Drupal 9 (highlighting how fast platform timelines shifted during the project).

The migration approach: phased and pragmatic

They describe a Phase 1 / Phase 2 / Phase 3 strategy because the site was far beyond a simple “lift and shift.”

Notable details:

Drupal 7 had 41 content types.
Kanopi and Exploratorium simplified the model by consolidating many outwardly-similar types (exhibits, exhibitions, galleries, events, etc.) into a single umbrella concept: “Experiences.”
Phase 1 focused on the Events / Calendar area first, since Exploratorium is a major in-person events destination, not just a content site.

The big challenge: complexity and “unknown unknowns”

A few recurring hurdles:

Hundreds of microsites / folders and old static HTML sections.
Long-tail legacy artifacts (“ping test page” type discoveries).
Internal churn and gaps in deep Drupal knowledge on the client team early on.
Stakeholder sprawl: marketing, fundraising, education teams, and high-profile projects (including NASA partnerships and an eclipse initiative).

George describes it as discovering “skeletons behind skeletons behind skeletons,” which is honestly the most accurate Drupal migration summary I’ve heard.

A clever launch tactic: split traffic across Drupal 7 and Drupal 9

To meet a critical deadline (the eclipse project):

They launched part of the new Drupal 9 experience early using domain masking / routing so some traffic went to Drupal 9 while the rest still hit Drupal 7.
This let them hit stakeholder timelines without delaying the broader site.

“Launch isn’t the end”: already planning Drupal 10

Even right after the Drupal 9 cutover (they mention 4/19 or 4/20), the next steps are in motion:

Plan the Drupal 10 upgrade before Drupal 9 end-of-life pressure.
Identify deprecated code and module readiness.
Consider editor shifts like CKEditor 4 → CKEditor 5.
Time it around organizational cycles like fundraising season.

What made the partnership work so well

This segment is basically a checklist of what good agency-client partnerships look like:

1) True collaboration

Exploratorium developers took tickets alongside Kanopi so they could learn the system and retain ownership.

2) Transparency + steady cadence

Weekly working sessions to prioritize, unblock, and handle “sticky” topics.

3) Capacity-building, not dependency

George explicitly wanted a partner who would help them become stronger, not a team that just took requirements “over the fence.”

4) Root-cause mindset

When they hit bugs in core/contrib, the posture wasn’t “patch it and move on,” but “can we fix this properly, maybe even contribute back?”