NBC PictureBox Films is a site we’ve looked after since we took it through a relaunch in 2013. Back then it was a B2C mobile first VoD platform (which was a finalist in Acquia’s 2014 Partner Site of the Year award), however, in 2016 it was repurposed as a set top box offering, and, alongside a rebrand, the site needed to change.
About the project
Goals
- Communicate to customers how the proposition had changed and how to access the service on a set top box.
- Allow the site to be multi-market, with the ability to have multiple broadcast partners in a single market.
- Direct users to the most relevant market using IP targeting, but also allow users to select their own market.
- To keep content management tasks to a minimum, aggregate all social activity into a single feed
- The service switchover from web based VoD to set top box had a hard change-over, so hitting the deadline was crucial
Our role at miggle was to take the project from inception through design and build and then to maintain on an on-going basis.
Outcome
The project delivered on time. In the first 6 months since launch the site has required just 13 hours maintenance.
Why Drupal was chosen
NBCUniversal already have a wide range of Drupal sites, and the original VoD Picturebox was also on Drupal, albeit Drupal 7. As the site effectively required a rebuild from scratch it made sense to do this on Drupal 8
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
While the project was a build from scratch, there was still content from the old site that needed to be retained. The migrate modules were used to import blog posts and imagery from the old system via a CSV export.
We used the paragraphs module in conjunction with the inline entity form module to provide flexibility to page creation. By using paragraph references rather than specific fields we allowed editors to create certain pages without a strict layout.
Video embed field creates a video field which allows editors to reference videos from multiple video suppliers e.g. YouTube and Vimeo, this functionality dynamic embeds the videos by copying the video URL.
The site features location specific content, in order to provide the most relevant user experience we made use of the Geocoder PHP library. Managing this dependency was made easy by the composer support in Drupal.
