College of Western Idaho

When the College of Western Idaho (CWI) needed to move off Drupal 7 before its end-of-life, they faced a high-stakes challenge: migrate a large, complex website with extensive content, numerous user roles, and deep integrations — without disrupting brand continuity or institutional workflows.

The risks of staying on an outdated CMS were clear:

• Security vulnerabilities due to expiring support
• Complex content architecture with too many content types
• Excessive user permissions and access sprawl
• A CMS holding large volumes of institutional information

While CWI wanted modernization, they did not want a visual redesign. The new platform needed to maintain the current look and feel while improving usability for both content editors and administrators.

CWI also wanted us to integrate their internal developers in order for their internal team to have the benefit of the immediate knowledge transfer as the project unfolded. So this would be a collaborative project between Kanopi and CWI.

CWI’s initiative was a complex, enterprise-level Drupal migration that required strategic planning, careful governance alignment, and disciplined execution.

We began with a comprehensive discovery and migration planning phase designed to reduce risk and create a clear roadmap for success. This included:

• A full audit of existing content types, fields, and taxonomy structures
• Analysis of user roles, permissions, and access controls to address sprawl and improve governance
• Review of editorial workflows and publishing processes
• Documentation of third-party integrations and system dependencies
• Development of a detailed Functional Requirements Document (FRD) to define the future-state architecture

This discovery process allowed us to identify structural inefficiencies, areas of redundancy, and opportunities to simplify the content model. It also ensured that institutional workflows and compliance considerations were preserved throughout the transition.

With a clear migration strategy in place, we streamlined CWI’s content architecture into a more logical, scalable framework. By leveraging Drupal 11’s enhanced content modeling and configuration management capabilities, we reduced complexity, consolidated content types, and established a more maintainable foundation for long-term growth.

Although CWI did not seek a visual redesign, we modernized their design and front-end workflow to support sustainability and consistency. We migrated their existing Adobe XD files into Figma, restructuring and organizing UI components into a more systematic, component-driven design system.

To further strengthen the connection between design and development, we implemented Storybook as an intermediary layer between Drupal and the front end. This established a structured pattern library that promotes consistency, reusability, and long-term scalability. As a result, CWI retained its established brand and visual identity while gaining a more disciplined, maintainable, and future-ready platform.