Sector(s)
The first Arab social network of its kind focuses on promoting cultural activities such as reading groups, volunteer initiatives and community projects aimed at creating a positive impact on humanity. With a vision to expand its reach across the Middle East, the platform was relaunched to connect with a broader audience.
About the project
Our client's networking/community portal invites users to create communities to enable contribution to social causes. They let users clubs and projects around various social topics such as Education, Disaster Relief and so on. Users can create a mass movement for these topics and seek support which could be financial, physical or through donation of items.
Our client supports Arabic, a right to left language, as well as English, which is left to right. It also uses Apache Solr’s Faceted search to enable a faster and accurate search experience for its users. The site is integrated with various popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The user gets all notifications and updates for all these activities in one place.
In June 2012, the client decided to develop a mobile app for their site. Our development team brainstormed, conducted extensive research and delivered 80 APIs in a little over six weeks. We figured out the future requirements and built the APIs that the website might need to integrate with some other application going forward.
Why Drupal was chosen
An earlier version of the website was developed on Drupal 7 Dev version. However, the site had many core coding issues which led to huge performance challenges. Our team was roped in to clean out the issues and take the site live in a few weeks. Since the site was already on Drupal, it made sense to make all improvements and continue building on Drupal.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Business Benefits
- A high-performance community website: Today, our client has over 60,500 volunteers, 4000 clubs, 3300 projects to which over 8800 volunteering hours are being contributed. The site is delivering on the vision Ahmad had for the project.
- Drupal rescue: The customer had already spent thousands of dollars, yet the development work was not moving in the right direction, and the website was a mess. We came aboard, started fixing the bugs and handled the development work.
- Developed APIs for mobile apps: Though the brief from our client was to deliver 16 APIs, we conducted extensive research and delivered over 80 APIs that the website could need going forward.
- Delivery beyond the brief: Our consultative functioning approach helped the client discover requirements accurately throughout the project and the unflinching support helped them resolve all challenges that they and their tech vendors faced.
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