Sector(s)
Team Members
Farm Journal Media is a leading United States business information and media company serving the agricultural market. Started 140 years ago with the preeminent Farm Journal magazine, the company serves the row crop, livestock, produce and retail sectors through 26 branded websites, Newsletters and phone apps; 11 business magazines; 70 events; six nationally broadcasted television and radio programs; a robust mobile text marketing business; and an array of data-driven paid information products.
Valuebound helped Farm Journal Media with the redesigning of their 6 Magazine Sites that were built on Drupal 7. One of the redesigned site was Agprofessional. AgProfessional communication products provide agronomic and business management solutions to retailers/distributors, professional farm managers and crop consultants resulting in increased production and profitability in the food, fiber and energy marketplace.
About the project
The main goal of the site was to create a news site focused to agronomic and business management solutions which is easier to use for the editors and easy to evaluate for the stakeholders. One of the main requirement was to provide an intuitive solution for the DFP ads so that site maintainers can easily add or configure the ad placements. Even the ad slots were fixed the native ads and customized ads needed to be configurable for them.
Another key aspect of the site are the Featured Landing Page and Section Landing Page, where the later should serve as microsites for the former.
Key Approach and Features
- The portal included a news section with featured and latest news.
- Daily market updates fetched on a real time from QTMarketCenter.
- DFP Integration
- Customised Section to provide Editor selected News on HomePage.
- Third party widgets like Markets data to give real time updates, Greenbook Search Widget & Agricharts Weather Forecast Integration.
Technical Excellence
- Migrate a huge number of content by numerous editors of Farm Journal from legacy site to CCMS and then to New Ag Professional site.
- Equipped the website for news and information handling with built-in categories for classification
- Search API Solr Search Module for keyword searching in all the sites leveraging the Pantheon Search.
Highlights
- Content Tagging in CCMS based on categories. CCMS (Central Content Management System) is a central repository built by Valuebound for managing content by Farm Journal Editors. Content is created on CCMS and is exposed using RESTful API’s which are then consumed to create content on Agpro.
- Customised and Easy to use DFP Interface for Ad Placements.
- DFP integration to Drupal Views & Blocks.
Why Drupal was chosen
The legacy magazine site was built on Drupal 7 and as the Farm Journal Editors and Webmasters were familiar with managing content with Drupal 7 CMS so it was their first choice to migrate content and upgrade the sites to Drupal 8.
The editorial team from Agprofessional needed to easily manage all content, allowing its classification into different taxonomies, ability to create articles, a dashboard for the editors and easy to use content moderation. The core of the project architecture is an implementation of Drupal 8 as content manager. The robust permission and content authoring experience made Drupal as the CMS of the choice for the stakeholders and the editors. The Old Site contains large amount of content which is needed to be migrated to new system. Drupal 8 has matured & efficient in migration system. The new application has to be performed in cross platforms including mobiles and Tabs. We have used a customised version of the Pixel theme for the new sites.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Thunder:
Thunder consists of the current Drupal 8 functionality, lots of handpicked publisher-centric modules with custom enhancements (the Media Entity module, the Entity Browser module, and lots more), and an environment which makes it easy to install, deploy and add new functionality.
We Customised thunder for farm journal by adding custom modules so that common functionalities can be put together in a single thunder distribution and can be used on the 6 sites.
Features:
We used Features modules extensively for generating modules consisting of custom functionalities and added them in the Thunder distribution.
Bynder:
Bynder is used as a Digital Asset Management mostly for images that are used by the Editors of Farm Journal Media. We integrated Bynder's digital asset management (DAM) module which allows you to take control of your growing bank of digital content files; reducing the time to market of all marketing materials while enhancing stakeholder collaboration. The Drupal 8 module also allows to use the online resizing technique to be used in the site and uses Cloudfront CDN to deliver the images.
Brightcove:
Brightcove Video Connect drupal module was used to connect to brightcove api for fetching videos hosted on brightcove.
Migrate Plus & Migrate Tools:
The Migrate Plus & Migrate tools modules are used for managing migrations from CSV to Drupal 8.
Ultimate cron:
The site heavily depends on cron runs and for that we needed a granular control on over the crons in the site. Ultimate cron was the perfect module for the job.
