We recently spent some quality time with Claude Code to (finally!) update academy.drupaleasy.com, the training home for DrupalEasy's workshops and courses. We had several goals for the update, all of which we have achieved:
- A consistent, modern look
- Improved accessibility
- Verified class completion pages
- Office hours attendance statistics
- Prepare for the Drupal 11 upgrade
If you've never taken a DrupalEasy course, then (sadly) there won't be too much for you to see. But, for our hundreds of alumni, this upgrade hopefully provides a big improvement and some fun aspects as well.
New look
We admit it, design isn't our thing - it's always something that we contract out. In this case, we used Claude Design and Claude Code to update the site with a modern, flat design (really original, we know!)
Accessibility
While building out the new theme, we used the Drupal AI best practices' drupal-accessibility skill to continually ensure that changes we were making met the WCAG 2.2 AA standard.
Originally, we were going to focus on color contrast and keyboard navigation, but the drupal-accessibility skill made it quite easy to do so much more! Testing the home page with a few online tools:
- WAVE Evaluation tool - 0 issues found.
- axe DevTools - 0 issues found.
- Google Chrome Lighthouse - 100(!)
We're well aware that this is a rather narrow test, and we can't claim that the entire site meets the WCAG 2.2 AA standard completely, but we're definitely better off than we were before!
Verified class completion pages
If we're being honest, the impetus for all of this was the addition of Verified class completion pages that students can use with potential employers and clients as proof that they've completed one or more of our classes.
As an added bonus for our students, we also made it super-simple for them to add a link to their Verified class completion page from LinkedIn right from their academy.drupaleasy.com user profile edit page.
The button prepopulates the LinkedIn form for our students to add their DrupalEasy class to their profile's Licenses & Certifications section on LinkedIn.
Office hours attendance statistics
We've been holding weekly DrupalEasy Office Hours for over 15 years, and keeping track of attendance for almost 10 years. We always knew we wanted to do something with all this data, but never did - until now.
We added a bunch of fun reports (only available to DrupalEasy alumni - sorry!) to the site including all-time and yearly leaderboards (congrats, Sara!) as well as yearly, monthly, and day-of-week averages (for some reason, we get our best attendance in March.)
Prepare for Drupal 11 upgrade
We also took the opportunity to use the most excellent Upgrade Status module to help us identify aspects of the Drupal 10 site that needed attention before we could upgrade to Drupal 11 - this process was all done without the help of Claude Code.
We had a bunch of contrib modules to get updated, and just a small bit of custom code, but we're thrilled to see that the site is now 100% ready to move to Drupal 11. We'll make that move in the next week or two!
Summary
Overall, using a coding assistant absolutely saved us a great deal of time - especially with the accessibility improvements.
The process taught us a great deal about maximizing the use of a limited token budget when using a coding agent - lessons we'll definitely be building on in the future.
Absolutely no AI was used in the authoring of this post. Mistakes and typos are all mine!
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