Save the Children Spain

An NGO the size of Save the Children involves many people with different interests and needs. Their website had to be able to provide effective, powerful yet simple tools for all of them. Moreover, most of the functionalities were very specific and required Metadrop to create custom modules and extensions.

Requirements

For the Drupal 7 version, the following requirements were to be met:

• A multi-domain website with a single codebase
• The ability to accept anonymous donations.
• The ability to create recurring memberships.
• The ability to create signature campaigns.

• For donations and memberships, a multi-step but easy to use checkout with custom validations and processes (donations to NGOs are subject to specific treatment under Spanish law)
• A mini-site where the users can create their own crowdfunding campaigns for the NGO.
• A mini-site where the users can enroll in e-learning courses.
• A Search-API powered search engine capable of navigating the huge quantity of content available on the website.
• A rich content type capable of creating complex pages, referencing other entities (such as signature or donation campaigns) yet simple to use by editors.
• Advanced recollection of data to be sent to Google Analytics, including both client and server-side and custom metrics provided by the client.

In 2020, the migration to Drupal 8 was finished and the following requirements were added:

• A complete migration of all content and users.
• A system that allows journalists to easily sign up for press releases and access a release archive.
• The ability to create and send press releases to different journalist audiences, with advanced filtering and preview.
• A complete integration with Salesforce, both unidirectional and bidirectional and including a complete set of admin tools inside Drupal capable of detecting incidences, generating reports and exposing configuration.

What makes this project remarkable

The specific needs made this project a challenge that resulted in a great number of contributions and customizations. Metadrop had to develop a total of 36 custom modules, some of which - like the Salesforce integration - are full-fledged suites and include several submodules as well. Moreover, three sandboxes were created on drupal.org to satisfy some needs that were missing (like trying migrations or syncing payment states of Commerce orders) and will evolve in time into contributed modules.

Problems solved

During the development, we solved the following problems:

• In order to give the user the ability to create complex pages with references to other entities (like donations) and a set of fully functional items (like carousels, hero images, timeline), we developed a rich page content type and we used a carefully crafted mix of Bricks, Paragraphs and CKeditor templates.
• We were tasked with imagining a mailing system for press releases that allows us to select an audience, compose an email, test it and send it, all in the same form. We created a custom, AJAX-based solution that connects a Webform and a View in order to solve it.

• Donations and Memberships had very specific needs and Commerce entities weren’t suited for the task. We created new entities for them and then used Commerce for the checkout by leveraging its API. We even wrote an article about it!
• Our client had very specific and demanding needs regarding analytics, and the contrib modules were lacking some of them. We contributed several patches to modules such as Commerce Google Analytics and GA push, integrated Google Tag manager, developed custom dataLayer modules and solved many issues regarding data persistence on the server-side when using external payment gateways.
• The migration presented two great challenges. 
  • First, we had to carefully craft the migration of paragraphs - sometimes nested inside each other - in order to avoid losing the references between them and their hosting nodes. 
  • Secondly, we decided to transition files to media entities. It was easy on file fields, but then we found that images inside CKeditor-enabled text fields were missing because they weren’t tied to any entity and the image style had changed. We decided to do the right (and difficult) thing and convert these URLs to media entities also.
• We detected that sometimes the payment status of Commerce orders wasn’t in sync with the payment gateways, wrongly reporting some orders as unpaid. We created a tool to check the payment status both manually and by cron and update it accordingly.
• When working on our custom integration with Salesforce we stumbled upon many pitfalls, so we also developed a custom admin UI capable of:
  • Monitoring the connectivity and warning the client if down.
  • Informing about the data migration status and allowing it to manually perform the scheduled operations.
  • Exposing configuration.
  • Generating reports ready to use with https://dataloader.io