Skvare's team of experts help membership organization upgrade their technology

Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association has been the representative voice of mortgage lending in Colorado since 1956. The organization is committed to responsible homeownership achieved through the practice of integrity-based lending. 

CMLA reached out to Skvare at the end of 2021 seeking immediate support renewing their website security certificate. Between recent staff changes and a lack of documentation, they knew they needed help. CMLA consulted with several IT professionals about their certificate prior to reaching out to Skvare. The consultants' lack of proficiency with Drupal or Amazon Web Services left them needing more.

Skvare was able to fix the security certificate the same day CMLA reached out for support. From there conversations quickly turned to CMLA's concerns and dissatisfaction with their technology infrastructure. CMLA's website was built in Drupal 6 and integrated with CiviCRM for contact and membership management. Drupal 6 reached End-of-Life (EOL) in 2016. In addition, the organization had been experiencing recent website outages, as their website server was running out of space.

While keeping the website going, Skvare’s team began to migrate content and more than 2,000 registered users from CMLA’s old database to Drupal 9. The process also enabled CMLA to sunset the use of third-party forms by taking advantage of functionality within the new content management system. This provided for a website that would be easier for the small, nonprofit organization’s staff to update and maintain without hiring a dedicated web content team.

Even though the impetus for the technology change was to address technical debt, the migration to Drupal 9 provided CMLA with a timely opportunity to re-evaluate their content structure, branding, voice, and offerings to their members and broader community. The organization launched a new logo and streamlined their navigation and calls to action.

To build a new website that would be easier for staff to work with, Skvare opted for a sub-theme of the Barrio Bootstrap base theme for Drupal 9 layering Bootstrap Layout builder on top. The team also moved CMLA’s third-party application for membership to Drupal Webforms adding membership registration and payment processing through the single webform with Webform CiviCRM integration. This allowed both existing and new members to sign up through a single form reducing staff work and making it easier to apply any future updates in one place.

Skvare’s team also added new features to CMLA’s website by using custom-built extensions and modules contributed by its developers. These included CiviCRM Image Resize extension, a tool similar to Drupal Image Styles that works on the CRM side; CiviCRM CMS User extension, which creates new Drupal users based on tags and groups in the CRM; and CiviCRM Entity module, a critical tool for CiviCRM and Drupal integration maintained by Skvare’s team.

Learn more about how Skvare’s contributions to the open-source community.

While code running in the background and quietly doing their jobs often get overlooked, Skvare’s team also wanted to provide CMLA’s staff with the tools to make creating new content even easier. To do this, site builders created reusable custom blocks for easily creating hero images with accessible content and call-to-action buttons. Coupled with Layout Builder, these tools make it easy for content creators with little technical knowledge to create pages without needing to write code.

Solutions from Skvare’s experts gave the Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association more flexible technology that is both easier to use and maintain while also being ready for the future.

Learn more about how Skvare’s team of Drupal and CiviCRM experts help organizations better deliver on their missions when their technology does more.