Educational online portal – Projektmagazin

Objective

When we worked on this project, the projektmagazin’s website operated on Drupal 6. The 6th version of the content management system reached its end of life on February 24, 2016, and stopped receiving security updates accordingly. Thus, the website was at risk of security breaches and had to be migrated immediately.

We decided to migrate the site to Thunder CMS (Drupal-based content management system) as this solution is highly used in Europe and provides content editors with a user-friendly and intuitive working environment.

Challenges

Website migration is always challenging, especially when dealing with a site that has over 13,000 nodes and 13 content types. Our biggest challenge was to transfer all the content to the new environment while keeping it intact and ensuring it worked properly.

Technologies

Solution 

To migrate the content and ensure its compatibility with the new system, we utilized the Migration API. We split out the migration into small pieces, migrating each part of the content separately. For some parts of it, Process Plugins and Mapping Files were created in order to convert data to the right format that was supported by the new CMS.

The projectmagazin’s website content was indexed by Elasticsearch and kept in separate indexes for faster reindexing. We moved Elasticsearch to its own server to ensure higher performance both on the site and within the search tool. We also used Reactivesearch components to enable website visitors to quickly receive results for their queries, even when searching through thousands of nodes. This also allowed them to apply various filters including distance and date range.

In order to get user familiar with more content on the site, a custom solution for recommendation engine has been created. It provides different weight settings for content administrator that help to find the most relevant content for a user while they are reading a particular article on the site.

As a result of our work, projektmagazin now experiences handy content management 
with Thunder CMS and fast Elasticsearch. They also can scale their platform as their audience grows. Our team maintains and supports the company’s website, ensuring its high uptime and top-notch security.

AnyforSoft’s vast expertise in Drupal development resulted in a positive outcome for the customer.
 

Project Features

Apart from migrating the projectmagazin’s site to a newer CMS, we also implemented several important features. 

Search: A fast and reliable search tool was added to the site to help users find content that matches their needs. The engine also suggests content based on visitors’ interests.

Newsletter campaigns: We developed newsletter campaign features to ensure that editors are able to create new newsletter campaigns easily and add any content types to them.

Centralized subscription tool: Most of the content of the site is accessible via subscription. To ensure a smooth subscription process, we developed a centralized subscription tool.

Third-party integrations: We integrated the website with multiple third-party services, such as Mailchimp, Billwerk, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager.

Testimonials