Sector(s)

Project Team

Santhosh P
Senthil Kumar A
Yogeshnath V

Visit the site

Visit the site

Cascade Pump Company is a leading manufacturer of engineered, high capacity vertical pumps. Cascade Pump is the largest exclusive producer of Axial Flow and Mixed Flow pumping equipment in the world.

About the project

Goal:

  1. Migrate content and files from TikiWiki CMS to Drupal.
  2. Implement Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Single Sign On (SSO) to provide access to Windows active directory users without explicitly creating users accounts in the Drupal.
  3. Implement workflow and content moderation.
  4. Create a Wikipedia-like content website with aforementioned features.

Challenges:

There is no contributed module and migration tools available to migrate content and files from the TikiWiki CMS. Our developers created custom code to import the legacy data from the existing CMS.

To feed the imported data into the Drupal website, we made use of the ‘Feed Import’ module.

We needed more customization in ‘Workbench Moderation’ module in order to achieve various clients’ requirements. For example, the module, by default, does not have option for sending notifications to a user in a particular group. We had to create custom module to address such shortcomings.

Technical Excellence:

After successfully migrating from a conventional CMS to Drupal, the website experienced various improvisations in terms of user convenience like login, navigation, smart search and more. Here is a list of other betterments achieved through our developers’ coding prowess.

  1. A clutter-free classification of existing contents and files based on groups, helped in identifying documents easily.
  2. The existing login was made enough for signing into new website and employee groups without creating new user accounts in Drupal [ using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Single Sign On (SSO)]
  3. Faster loading time.
  4. Straightforward UI for easy navigation.
  5. Implemented workflow and content moderation.

Why Drupal was chosen

Cascade pump were using Tikiwiki CMS-based intranet portal to maintain technical files and documents of a wide range of pumps. The Tikiwiki CMS was quite primitive in certain areas like Windows active directory integration through LDAP, Single Sign On (SSO), group-wise content access and options for content moderation. So, we chose Drupal to help the client leverage on the advancements in the above mentioned features through Drupal.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Drupal Commons:

Drupal Commons is an open-source framework used for building social community websites. This framework was used to create a new social community website that replicates the currently existing social community set up used by employees of Cascade Pump which they login through windows active directory.

Our developers enabled employees to access the newly built Drupal-based social community through their existing Windows active directory login itself. This ditched the dependency to create new user logins for the Drupal-powered website. Users were granted permissions to the group they are already a member of, to share contents.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP):

We used this contributed module to integrate the windows active directory and Drupal. After integration of this module, users of active directory were able to access Drupal without explicitly creating accounts in the Drupal and sign-in Drupal without providing credentials using Single Sign On (SSO).

Workbench Moderation:

We used this module to create workflow and moderate the content. By default, this module contains three moderation states, namely, ‘Draft’, ‘Needs Review’ and ‘Published'. The “Draft” state informs that the work is in progress, “Needs Review” state informs that the content is ready for moderation and the “published” state denotes that the content can be published.

Filedepot:

We used this module to store and access files. Filedepot is a Document Management module. For safe access and distribution, Filedepot module allows documents to be saved outside Drupal public directory.

Search API:

We used this module to implement partial keyword search. It incorporates facetting support and uses the ‘Views’ module for displaying search results, filters, etc.

Linkchecker:

We used this module to extract the broken links from the content using the HTTP response code. It shows all broken links in the reports/logs section and on the content edit page.