Sector(s)

Team Members

mahaveer003, imalabya, suraj2012, ajay_reddy, aditya_anurag

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Pixels theme has been made available to the community. Pixel is a lightweight, responsive, three column layout theme which gives a premium look and feel to a website. Pixel's modern look and suit perfectly for showcasing your work, personal blogs or corporate and media websites.

Pro Farmer is a robust new portfolio of freemium services focused on the information needs of agricultural professionals — helping business owners and producers alike manage risk, make better decisions and be more successful.

Subscribers to Farm Journal Pro gain access to valuable market news and analysis from Pro Farmer.

About the project

The main goal of the the portal was to create a news site for their readers along with handling subscription for the users. For payment and invoices for subscription Pro Farmer should be connected with Microsoft Dynamic tools like Great plains & Nodus for payments, subscription renewals and cancellation. Apart from these the portal will also incorporate other third party widgets like Markets data, Price tracking tool and Weather to give real time updates.

Key Approach and Features

  • The portal included a news section with featured and latest news
  • It has daily market updates fetched on a real time from Barcharts
  • The website is a premium content only website with third party integrated payments for all of the readers enabled through PayFabric
  • Content is displayed after successful payments or creation of user based CSR
  • The website is integrated with financial management or ERP software - Microsoft Dynamics previously known as Great Plains
  • Ability to add free articles and trial periods for users.
  • Crop tours, a feature, provide 6 months or up and down crop trends

Technical Excellence

  • Built in Customer Service portal to help in resolving and monitoring subscriber issues The website has SOAP clients integrations with GP (Microsoft Dynamics) and uses curl for payment with pay fabric
  • Content access based on subscription
  • Migration of ten thousand users from the legacy database pertaining their credentials

Highlights

  • Daily market updates from Pro Farmer
  • Industry leading ag policy and Washington coverage
  • Inputs Monitor fuel and fertilizer price tracking tool
  • Recent farmland sales
  • Ahead of the Open market news
  • Midweek Cash Market Updates
  • Pro Farmer's Daily Advice Monitor

Why Drupal was chosen

Functionally, the editorial team from Pro Farmer needed to easily manage all content, allowing its classification into different taxonomies, ability to make the articles free or paid, a dashboard for the editors and easy to use content moderation. The core of the project architecture is an implementation of Drupal 8 as content manager. The robust permission and content authoring experience made Drupal as the CMS of the choice for the stakeholders and the editors.

Even though Drupal has a commerce option, the portal had to be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics: Nodus & Payfarbric for payment and subscription invoices. Drupal’s elastic extensibility was a good choice to integrated these external tools to handle the whole subscription management.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Migrate, Migrate tool & Migrate Plus

    The combination of these modules helped us to migrate thousands of users from the legacy system into Drupal 8 from a CSV source.
  • Entity Construction Kit

    Entity Construction Kit was the base for creating the configurable entity types which was used for subscriptions and related features.
  • Entity Print

    The Entity Print was used to download the entities such as nodes and subscription invoices as PDF.
  • Brightcove Video Connect

    Brightcove was used by Farm Journal to serve their videos. The module was used to integrate the Brightcove platform with Drupal by pulling in the videos and serving them in Drupal.
  • Ultimate cron

    The site heavily depends on cron runs and for that we needed a granular control on over the crons in the site. Ultimate cron was the perfect module for the job
  • Pixels

    Pixel theme was initially a custom theme for the site, but we contributed it back. The theme is lightweight and a large number of regions which was used in the project.