Craft CMS > Any other CMS

We were approached by Mon­u­ment Graph­ics in July of 2020 regard­ing a mas­sive over­haul of Aspen Recre­ation. At the time, their cur­rent web­site, which was built upon Vae CMS, was shut­ting down in a few months, and they need­ed to move from Vae CMS to a more mod­ern tech stack. 

Enter Craft CMS.

Flavors galore

Like anything built on the web these days, there are a ton of approaches one can take. The same can be said in terms of how software authors handle building said platforms for business owners to manage content, sell products, and more.

Not nearly as polished as Craft CMS

Vae CMS from our lim­it­ed expo­sure to it was­n’t all bad. The inter­face made find­ing bits of con­tent a lit­tle dif­fi­cult and as you can see from the screen cap­tures, the client por­tal was a bit dat­ed and offered no mobile view.

Vae cms screenshots artboard
Craft cm screenshot

Where would we start?

We first started the migration process by examining all of the various data structures. Luckily for us Vae CMS sported an XML feed export. Although it wasn't all that robust, it did allow us to get most of the pertinent data, and with some custom programming we were able to compile our own feeds from that and import the data via FeedMe into our Craft CMS website.

From there we were able to break out all of the necessary sections in Craft CMS which helped set the stage for the frontend templating.

TLDR;

This project was by far the biggest project we’ve built here at Hybrid inter­ac­tive. There were a bevy of obsta­cles that we faced. Through it all we were able to rely on our expe­ri­ence to not only wran­gle in the data, but were able to lever­age the pow­ers of Craft CMS, most notably the GraphQL and con­tent builder options, to cre­ate an easy-to-use inter­face for the Aspen Recre­ation team.

Aspen recreation responsive with bg updated

How would we put it all together?

Built with Tail­wind­C­SS, Vue­JS, GraphQL, and Craft CMS’s robust Twig tem­plat­ing, we were able to build quite the pow­er­ful web appli­ca­tion. Aspen Recre­ation sports a cus­tom Site Mod­ule that feeds the Cal­en­dar, a mul­ti-lev­el Vue­JS nav­i­ga­tion, and oh-so-many-more fea­tures that would take an eter­ni­ty to out­line.

All in all, it has been a good expe­ri­ence for us work­ing with Mon­u­ment Graph­ics and the fine folks at Aspen Recre­ation. We were able to deliv­er a unique expe­ri­ence to vis­i­tors all while cre­at­ing an easy to use Author­ing Expe­ri­ence for Aspen Recre­ation’s web­site team.