Columbia Law School
Human Rights Institute website connecting global programs, publications, and people across 30+ countries.
The Human Rights Institute (HRI) at Columbia Law School is a leading centre for human rights advocacy, research, education, and scholarship. They needed a website that could represent the breadth and interconnectedness of their global work.
The Challenge
The Human Rights Institute approached e4education to design and build their new website, with one requirement: it had to be Drupal, as that's Columbia Law School's institutional standard. Since e4education don't do Drupal, they brought me in to handle the full Drupal build from their designs. As the project progressed, I moved into a direct relationship with Columbia, completing their rigorous supplier on-boarding process to work with the university directly.
HRI's work spans dozens of countries, multiple long-running programs, and hundreds of publications, events, and people. The site needed to:
- Represent complex relationships between content — a publication might belong to both a program and a project, a person might span multiple initiatives
- Display an interactive world map showing where HRI's work has impact
- Import events automatically from Columbia's institutional calendar
- Integrate with Columbia Law School's CAS single sign-on
- Give non-technical editors flexible page layouts they could manage independently
- Handle enterprise-level traffic with appropriate caching and search
The Solution
Built a content-rich Drupal platform with 11 interconnected content types and a paragraph-based page building system that gives editors complete control.
- Content architecture: Programs, projects, publications, news, events, people, alumni, and partners — all cross-referenced so editors can link content across the site
- Interactive world map: Custom implementation using taxonomy terms with X/Y coordinates, dynamically positioning country markers with popup content generated from related programs and projects
- Automated event imports: Feeds integration processing external CSV data daily, deduplicating by GUID, and automatically downloading documents and extracting OpenGraph images
- Flexible page building: 11 paragraph types including text blocks, image+text layouts, accordions, carousels, and promoted content blocks
- Institutional SSO: CAS authentication integration with Columbia Law School's single sign-on
- Enterprise caching: Memcache + Varnish stack with full-text search via Search API (highlighting, transliteration, case-insensitive matching)
The Results
Delivered a content platform that enables HRI editors to manage a complex web of interconnected content without developer involvement. The flexible architecture means new programs, projects, and relationships can be created editorially. The interactive map visually communicates global reach, and automated imports keep event listings current without manual data entry.