Arapahoe Community College
Working together since 2019
Arapahoe Community College's program and course catalog keeps expanding. We designed and built a new site organized around that catalog, now running on Drupal 11, with accessibility designed into the theme from the start.
- Custom theme designed and tested against WCAG 2.1 AA
- Daily course and program imports from Modern Campus Catalog
- Two-way relationships between programs and the courses they include
- Program and course catalog search built on Drupal
About this project
The challenge
Arapahoe Community College's program and course catalog was growing, and that kind of data lives in the systems that run the college, not in the website. Keeping a public catalog accurate by retyping it does not scale, and a catalog that drifts out of date is worse than no catalog at all when a prospective student is deciding where to apply. As a public college, ACC also has to meet accessibility obligations, which are far cheaper to meet by design than to remediate later.
What we built
We designed and built a new Drupal site with the catalog at its center, and it runs on Drupal 11 today. A custom importer pulls courses and programs from Modern Campus Catalog daily and rebuilds the relationships between them in both directions, so a program lists the courses it includes and each course shows the programs it belongs to. Holding those links in the data rather than in hand-maintained pages is what keeps the catalog navigable as it grows. Catalog search is built on Drupal, letting prospective students browse and narrow an expanding list of programs without hunting through pages. The theme was custom designed and built with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility in mind from the start, so accessibility is part of the design itself, and custom module development covers the parts the catalog needed that no contributed module provided.
The result
The catalog reflects the college's source data every day without staff re-entering it, which removes a recurring manual job and the errors that come with it. Because accessibility is built into the theme and its templates, new catalog pages start from an accessible foundation as the catalog grows.
Built with
- Drupal 11
- Modern Campus Catalog integration
- Custom course and program importer
- Two-way course and program relationships
- Custom accessible theme
- Custom module development
- Program and course catalog search
- Accessible front-end development