UCLA Extension
Strategic guidance led to a more accessible and flexible website.
Client Overview
For over a century, UCLA Extension has helped learners prepare to live better lives through the power of education.
As one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most comprehensive continuing and professional studies providers, UCLA Extension provides a wide range of options for life-long learners, whether they are advancing in their career, switching career paths, or pursuing personal growth.
Services provided
UCLA mobile gallery
The challenge
With a complex digital ecosystem supporting thousands of courses and programs, UCLA Extension needed a website implementation that could match both the ambition of their designs and the realities of their underlying systems.
UCLA Extension engaged Kanopi to support the development and implementation of designs created by another agency. While the visual designs were strong, there were accessibility issues that hadn’t been addressed and needed resolving. Additionally, several critical edge cases hadn’t been fully accounted for — particularly in areas where dynamic data and complex content relationships were required.
Program and specialization pages were a key example. These pages needed to display extensive course information sourced from a third-party course management system. While the designs assumed a straightforward data import, the reality required thoughtful technical problem-solving to ensure the content rendered accurately, flexibly, and consistently within the design framework.
UCLA Extension has a capable internal development team, but they were the first to say they aren’t Drupal specialists. Much of their site relies on data living outside of Drupal, which introduced questions around:
- How content should be structured
- How much customization was needed to support the designs
- How to balance flexibility with long-term maintainability
This project ultimately became a staff augmentation engagement, with Kanopi stepping in to bridge specific expertise gaps, collaborate closely with UCLA Extension’s developers, and help them confidently move the project forward.
The process
Entity Reference Diagram
We created a comprehensive ERD that mapped design elements directly to Drupal components. This ensured alignment between design intent, data structure, and implementation.
Components Plan
We also developed a component inventory and consolidation spreadsheet, outlining how multiple design variations could be supported through fewer, more powerful components, while eliminating unnecessary components.
The solution
Kanopi partnered closely with UCLA Extension’s internal team, providing hands-on Drupal expertise, technical leadership, and knowledge transfer throughout the build.
To meet a tight launch window in October ahead of the school’s next quarterly enrollment period, we brought in additional Drupal experts to accelerate development without sacrificing quality or best practices. Rather than simply doing the work, we focused on empowering UCLA Extension’s team to maintain and evolve the site long after launch.
While the original designs included a long list of highly specific components, we identified opportunities to standardize and extend them instead. This reduced technical overhead, improved flexibility, and significantly streamlined the editor experience, making it easier for content creators to build rich pages without being overwhelmed by options.
The result
By combining staff augmentation with strategic guidance, Kanopi helped UCLA Extension:
- Launch on time for a critical academic deadline
- Successfully implement complex designs tied to external data sources
- Handled edge cases not accounted for in the designs
- Strengthen their internal Drupal expertise
- Ensure WCAG AA 2.2 compliance
- Improve the long-term editor experience through a cleaner, more flexible component system
The result is a site that not only meets UCLA Extension’s immediate needs, but also equips their team with the tools and confidence to continue growing and evolving the platform. Additionally, UCLA Extension has since continued with Kanopi for ongoing monthly support.
