CALA Website Migration

An in-depth analysis of what we did to migrate the contents from CALA old website to a new one based on Jekyll.

Go to the website by CLICKING HERE

Introduction

Since 2021, I have been an active member at Chinese American Librarian Association. My responsibilities was to provide technical support to the organization. Therefore, my usual contribution will always include something related to coding. Over the years, I have been curating the election process using Qualtrics (a survey tool if you are not familiar with). However, I guess the most important work that I have ever accomplished is migrating the over-50-years worth of CALA contents to a new website.

Despite the fact that it is an excruciating process, I would like to briefly introduce you the techniques, technologies and difficulties that we have come across.

Methodologies

We were first debating what type of technologies we are using to build the new website. The original website is written in Drupal. As a content management system, it provides convenience in terms of updating and managing online content. However, the rigid structure and antique display has always been a disadvantage in terms of modern days design. Therefore, after careful scrutinization, we have decided to build a new website for CALA.

The question is, what should the new framework be? Although are tempted to build a website using up-to-date technologies, they are mostly applied to e-commerce sites. As a static website, CALA will not expect such a great amount of data flow and users will not need to send data to the backend as well.

In this sense, we have narrowed down our requirements to the following three points:

The final framework we have picked is called Jekyll. It is a Ruby-based frontend framework and since we can store our contents in markdown files and monitor them using liquid, after running several training trials with librarians, we have concluded that this might the optimal framework for us to build the new website.