Untangling a Decade-Old Drupal Site for a Global Coalition
IPEN is a global coalition working to eliminate toxic chemicals worldwide. With decades of reports, policy wins, and multilingual resources spanning 100+ countries, their aging Drupal 7 site had become hard to navigate and even harder to maintain.
Staff struggled to update content. Visitors struggled to find it.
IPEN came to Cornershop looking for a partner who understood both the technical complexity and the mission urgency, and they already knew what we could do from our previous work together on StopPoisonPlastic.org.
Building a Multilingual WordPress Platform Around How Staff Work
We started with discovery: understanding IPEN’s audiences, editorial workflows, and how staff actually used the site.
From there, we approached this as web development for nonprofits at scale—building a modern, WCAG 2.1 AA—compliant WordPress site with:
- Multilingual support via TranslatePress
- Custom content types for news, resources, documents, conferences, and regional hubs
- Advanced search and filtering on the publications archive
Migrating Two Sites’ Worth of Content Without Leaving Anything Behind
The content migration was the most complex piece. IPEN’s library spanned two sites — ipen.org (Drupal 7) and StopPoisonPlastic.org.
We handled programmatic migration of bulk content and manual migration for pages requiring custom layouts, working closely with IPEN’s team throughout to catch edge cases and ensure nothing got left behind.
An Accessible, Low-Bandwidth Site Ready to Perform From Day One
The new site reflects our approach to WCAG compliance for nonprofits—built for a global audience at scale: accessible, low-bandwidth optimized, and easy for non-technical staff to maintain without developer support.
We completed full SEO technical setup, inlcuding 301 redirects, XML sitemap, Google Search Console, so the site was ready to perform from day one.
What IPEN Gained From the Rebuild
- Modern WordPress site replacing a decade-old Drupal 7 platform
- Multilingual support serving audiences across 100+ countries
- Custom content architecture editable by non-technical staff
- Advanced search and filtering across thousands of documents
- Full content migration from two source sites
- WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and low-bandwidth optimization
- Complete SEO technical setup from launch
IPEN now has a site that reflects the scale of their work — and one their team can actually own.
See more of our Web Design and Multilingual site work!
