UX Magazine is a one-stop resource exploring all facets related to user experience. UX Magazine works closely with practitioners and industry leaders versed in all areas of UX to provide a steady stream of current, informative, and credible information about UX and related fields to enhance the professional and creative lives of UX practitioners and those exploring the field.
Specbee helped UX Magazine develop their primary publishing website, and a number of their microosites for conferences and events, job postings and award programs.
About the project
Key Objectives
When Specbee embarked on the website development, UX Magazine set out some clear-cut requirements. The project marked the first of its kind, a publishing platform dedicated to provide credible information about UX and related fields. They also required an ecommerce implementation with subscription management.
Undertaking the development of a brand new website, we leveraged Drupal’s out of the box functionalities and helped UX Magazine meet their objectives to:
- Provide an engaging publishing platform for UX articles, to handle high traffic
- Ability to generate sales by selling webinar to craft a marketplace for subscribed users.
- Deliver advertisements using DoubleClick for Publisher.
- Microsites for their award programs, job listings, conferences and webinars.
Solutions Provided:
Understanding the requirements from UX stakeholders, we designed a workflow of the different components of the system viz. Editors, Users and Reader.
- Drupal’s Workbench moderation was the go to module to build a dashboard for the editors to manage the contents and moderate them to serve quality contents to the readers.
- Drupal Commerce was used to build the subscription management to help with the sales of the contents by offering the contents as products to the commerce system.
- DFP module was used to serve targeted advertisements to visitors.
Apart from these, other tools and expertise like Solr, Varnish, etc was involved to make the site perform faster and keep it engaging for the end users.
Key Features
- Custom Drupal modules for a flexible content publishing framework.
- Responsive theming for all screen sizes using ZEN on 7.x as base theme.
- Shopping cart integration and management.
- Flexible and fully customizable discount/offer creation/management module.
- Questionnaire generation module for participant assessment (for awards).
Technical Excellence
- Server Maintenance and Optimization using Memcache and Varnish to handle high traffic.
- LMS integration for handling and managing registrations and payments.
- Search API Module, along with Views and database backend, powers the search functionality of the website.
RESULTS
The project was delivered well within the defined time and budgets, with the best implementation of Drupal. Post launch, the new look website proved effective at promoting new content, garnereing 1 Million+ page hits.
Why Drupal was chosen
The requirements of the project were quite specific. Easily manage all content, allowing its classification into different taxonomies, a dashboard for the editors and easy to use content moderation and user subscriptions for contents. These contents needs to be readily accessible to the users and to be searched quickly. Due to massive amount of anticipated data, Solr was selected as a the search platform. Apart from these, the ecommerce angle of the subscription management was also a candidate where a payment gateway have to integrated with the system to cater the contents to their subscribed users only.
Drupal was an ideal choice for building the project since it has the flexibility and robustness to be attached with 3rd apps like Apache Solr and also Drupal commerce for user subscription management. The abundance of contributed modules in Drupal, most of the requirement could be met with mostly out of the box solutions or these contributed module. The core of the project architecture is an implementation of Drupal as content manager.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal Commerce – The base of the subscription management in the portal. Drupal commerce was used to create content as product so that those can be sold to subscribed user to deliver premium contents.
Drupal Workbench – Backbone of the project since the contents are generally user generated. Workbench provided a centralized dashboard for the content for moderation to cater quality contents.
Panels: Panels was an essential module to be used to build and create layouts of the pages quickly and effectively. Views combined with Panels give structure to our content presentation.
Rules – A key module that allows us to set conditions and actions based on the conditions which was particularly useful for subscription management and moderation of contents.
Apache Solr – The search platform integration with Drupal to index the contents in Apache Solr and provide faceted search for quickly accessible and searchable contents.
Memcache and Varnish Integration to enhance site performance to deliver a seamless and highly performing site to the readers and end users.
