The Geneva Association is the international association of insurance and reinsurance CEOs, and the think tank for the global insurance industry. Their site has to carry research, conferences, webinars and press as a matter of course. In April 2021 we rebuilt it: a full Drupal 8 build, a new theme, a migration off Drupal 7, and an integration with their event management system so events became Drupal content automatically.
Drupal 7 to 8
This was not a version bump in place. Drupal 8 is a different architecture: Symfony under the hood, a new theme layer, configuration in code. We built the new site, themed it, and migrated content from Drupal 7 so research, publications and the rest of the library arrived in the new structure rather than being re-entered.
Theming
The public site had to read as a serious research organisation: reports, conferences, awards, news. We themed the Drupal 8 build for that, so editors could publish in the CMS and the front end stayed consistent across research topics, events and media.
Events into Drupal, automatically
Conferences and forums are core to the Association. Those events lived in an event management system. We integrated it so the feed created and updated Drupal nodes and entities on the site: no duplicate typing, and the public programme stayed in step with the system that actually ran the events.
Outcome
The Association moved off Drupal 7 onto a themed Drupal 8 site, with events arriving as Drupal content from the event platform rather than as a second editorial job. The live site is at genevaassociation.org.
