Sector(s)
InfoPlease - A mobile-first social platform to help people socialize professionally
InfoPlease is known to be the most famous and comprehensive information portal in the US before Wikipedia came into being. It has been providing authoritative answers to all kinds of factual questions for more than seven decades. It began its journey as a popular radio quiz show, moving on to being an annual almanac, eventually growing into www.infoplease.com with accurate content written by experts. Irrespective of the profile and competencies, Information Please has remained dedicated to providing reliable information about history, politics, science, current affairs, and much more in an engaging and entertaining manner. It is a well-trusted site for parents, teachers, and librarians alike.
About the project
The Goal
Information Please wanted to implement a robust and scalable Web Content Management System and required to migrate massive and unmanageable data stored in folders in the form of 400K HTML flat files with no structure. There were many intricate challenges in this project like scraping this huge amount of data, digging out relevant data, putting it in a database and defining proper tags and structures for the same.
Key Requirements
- Built a robust and scalable WCM on Drupal 8 in a quick turn around time of 3 months
- Bulk migration from an unstructured flat file system to Drupal 8 without losing any data, metadata, etc.
- Built a completely dynamic website with well-defined taxonomies
- Implement quicker and more simplified access by users to required information
- Improve user interface with a better look and feel
Solution and Results
- For Encyclopaedia, Dictionary, and Thesaurus, content is fetched from 3rd party and directly maintained in Drupal, which ensures that content is displayed as it is without being changed
- Content rendered on the basis of tags and placement in taxonomy, which was not there earlier Used Acquia SOLR search which is more suitable for Drupal than the earlier Google Search Converted certain tools like Calculator, Spell Check and placed in Drupal
- Defined proper structures and categories for faster and better filtering and showcasing of data
- Used the same database and a single code base
Why Drupal was chosen
The were many motivations behind choosing Drupal 8 as it came bundled with following benefits-
- Quick and easy page management – Any approved user can quickly and easily publish web pages without complicated software or programming.
- Consistent brand and navigation – Design templates provide a consistent brand image and standard navigation across the website for the client.
- Workflow management – An integrated workflow process for reviewing and approving content before publishing it on the client website.
- Database-driven – Only need to change data once for it to be updated throughout the client website.
- Shared resources – Website managers have access to shared resources, such as modules, images, audio and video files, etc.
- Mobile ready – The CMS automatically scales the site to fit tablets, mobile devices, and smaller browser windows.
- Updates— The CMS allows alerts to be set to notify the editor when content needs to be reviewed, updated or removed.
- Bulk migration from an unstructured flat file system to Drupal 8 without losing any data, metadata, etc.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Memcache module that provides a comprehensive administrative overview of Drupal's interaction with Memcached and stats.Facebook Comment Block module allows users to comment using Facebook's commenting box with as little configuration as possible. It adds a new block "Facebook Comments" which acts as a Facebook commenting widget.
