Mcubed 3.0 Drupal 8 Upgrade & Website Redesign Share: Symmetri Technology Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 20 December 2018 Reading Time 2-Minute Read A complete upgrade, redesign, and web application rebuild from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Overview What do you do with success? You build on it. By the close of the 2017 Mcubed funding cycle, nearly 500 projects had been launched on the platform. This represented $60 million worth of investment into new projects ranging from public health exercise programs to infrared-powered neural implants. The Mcubed staff received the President’s Staff Innovation Team Award for implementing newly developed best practices and creating new features that make the Mcubed process more responsive and inclusive. That’s one very successful program; and Drupal web application. But the vision of the Mcubed program does not rest and has been completely rebuilt on the Drupal 8 platform by Symmetri. Challenge After earning this level of high profile accolades, the Mcubed program is ready for its next evolution. The old Drupal 7 technology platform easily extended to include the U-M Dearborn campus, but that is hardly the extent of the project’s vision. Taking Mcubed to the 3.0 level will mean allowing for national expansion and a significant upgrade in the capacity and efficiency of the underlying technology. Symmetri provided the technical infrastructure to meet this challenge with a complete Drupal 8 rebuild. Solution Symmetri launched the Mcubed 2.0 website on Drupal 7 with a master plan for phased growth into the 3.0 national model. Rebuilding the website in Drupal 8, the latest version of Drupal has significantly impacted the ability of the platform to keep pace with the project owners expanding vision. Drupal 8 boasts an impressive new object-oriented programming architecture built on the Symfony framework. Few content management systems can offer such a forward-thinking approach to programming complex web applications. A project as sophisticated as Mcubed is the perfect candidate to take full advantage of the Drupal 8 platform and its support for deep integrations with API data sources, decoupled architecture, and modern inline content editing. Results Rebuilt from the ground up; this new Drupal 8 web development project was launched with the much-needed improvements, ready to begin cubing new projects in the fall of 2018. First Michigan and then the nation; Mcubed makes new ideas go, and Symmetri builds the Drupal 8 platform that powers the new standard in web-based research funding management.