Overview

NWT Arts is a marketing initiative administered by the Government of the Northwest Territories' Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment. The site represents resident artists across the territory — connecting them with potential buyers, promoting NWT culture, and giving artists a public profile they can manage themselves. I've worked on this site at Kellett Communications for many years, across two major versions.

A Long-Running Project

The current Drupal 10 site is a rebuild from a Drupal 7 version I worked on extensively. One thread that runs through both versions is per-field privacy on artist profiles — the ability for artists to make individual fields (contact details, address, social links) public or private independently of one another.

On D7, I solved this with a contributed module I published on drupal.org, built specifically out of this project's requirements. On D10, the approach changed: privacy is now handled by wrapping sensitive fields in Paragraphs and toggling the paragraph's published status as the privacy mechanism — no custom entity field infrastructure needed, just a clever use of what Paragraphs already provides.

Registration and Profile Management

The core of the site is a self-serve registration system for artists, arts organizations, retailers, and suppliers. Registration is handled through Webforms with a custom handler layer (nwtarts_profiles) that maps submitted form data into structured Drupal content nodes — including media uploads, paragraph fields, and taxonomy references — all in a single submission. On submission, profiles enter a moderation queue rather than publishing immediately. An admin must review and approve each registration before it appears publicly.

Artist Manager Role

Some artists — particularly those in remote communities — aren't comfortable managing a web profile themselves. To support them, the site has an Artist Manager role. Managers can create and maintain profiles on behalf of a set of artists in their area, with access scoped to only the profiles they're associated with. A region-scoped admin permission also allows regional coordinators to edit any artist in their geographic area without full admin access.

Artist Directory

The public artist directory at /search/artists is powered by Search API with a Solr backend. Visitors can filter by Culture, Genre, Medium, and Community using AJAX-driven facet dropdowns (built on a shared kci_ajax_facets module), toggle to show only artists with an online store, and do keyword search. Because members can choose private profiles, the directory only surfaces those who have opted in — the site includes a note explaining this to visitors who might not find a specific artist.

Bilingual Support

The site is fully bilingual (English and French), as required for a Government of the NWT program. Artist biographies are provided in the artist's preferred language, and the site encourages French-language requests through a staff contact rather than automated translation.

Other Features

• Leaflet map integration for community browsing
• Mailchimp newsletter signup
• Automated content archival via kci_content_archiver for time-sensitive listings
• Events and Artist Opportunities sections managed through Layout Builder
• Gin-based admin theme with a customized admin toolbar