Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Ashish Thakur
Alok Nawaria
Jeet Lal
Ashish Pandey
Sarthak
Harshita Saini
Manish Jatwani
Harsh Behl
Aayushi Bisht
Rohit Yadav
Aayushi Garg
Teacher Vision - A SaaS-based portal migrated from a custom CMS to Drupal 8
TeacherVision.com is a one-stop repository of all teaching tools and classroom ready resources for teachers from K-12th grade. It provides a quick access to over 22,000 worksheets, workbooks, timesavers, whiteboard-compatible digital books, lesson plans, teaching ideas, videos, activities, etc. Over the last 10 years, teachers have trusted TeacherVision.com for high-quality, up-to-date resources, most effective classroom management tips, and effective learning for their students. TeacherVision.com desired to transform the old website to a high-performance, a SaaS-based portal in Drupal 8, with efficient and more flexible subscription handling, dynamic design with an improved look and feel, and faster content delivery to end users.
TeacherVision.com was initially built on a cumbersome CMS with a lot of static code and content tagged by subject/grade. Existing processes were slow and tedious and it used to take almost 15 days for the admin team to push new content to the website. Also, the content search was time-consuming and not user-friendly.
Teachervision engaged TO THE NEW to create a content rich and responsive website by migrating from a 20-year old in-house CMS to a new Drupal CMS that could handle subscriptions in a faster and more flexible manner and makes content edits easy for content editors. The client wanted to preserve the bookmarks post migration since it could have resulted in revenue loss. They also wanted to change the way content is being served to end users by changing the look and feel as well as maximizing the search speed.
Client Challenge
- TeacherVision.com was initially built on a cumbersome CMS built on core PHP and was not very flexible to publish content directly on the production environment.
- Existing processes were slow and tedious and it used to take almost 15 days for the admin team to push new content to the website.
- Process of updating third party contents like dictionary, encyclopedia, who2 Biographies and world leader was not easy and most of the content was outdated. Site URLs and SEO for content pages were not as per industry standard.
- Content search was time-consuming and not user-friendly.
About the project
The Goal
- The client wanted to migrate from a 20-year old in-house CMS to a new CMS that is content rich and responsive with a great user experience & design, flexibility and faster subscription handling, optimised taxonomy and easy to manage admin portal.
- Teachervision wanted to switch to a new CMS that allows flexibility of making content edits easily for content editors.
- Client wanted to preserve the bookmarks post migration as loosing it could have resulted in revenue loss.
- They also wanted to change the way content is being served to end users by changing the look and feel as well as maximizing the search speed.
The seamless migration of content from legacy CMS to Drupal 8.
The client desired for a new structure/framework with search filters at the first click itself, facilitating immediate access to required data.
Solutions & Results
- Entire end-to-end integration was implemented in less than 3 months
- Subscriptions module is now flexible enough to implement changes in subscription plans quickly
- Content manageability, accessibility, portability and publishing have reached the optimum level
- New design and architecture of the application improved the reach in the market.
- Seamless migration of content from legacy CMS to Drupal 8
- New structure/framework with search filters at the first click itself, facilitating immediate access to required data
- Subscriptions module is now flexible enough to implement changes in subscription plans quickly
- Built modules that were incompatible with Drupal 8 by porting them from lower versions and re-configuring and customizing them
- Built modules that share a common codebase and database for multiple websites Drupal 8’s multi-domain functionality
- Implemented drag/drop functionality for the editor cutting down a lot of manual work using Responsys; resulting in exceptional newsletter editing experience.
- Identified critical bugs and fixed them during Drupal implementation.
Why Drupal was chosen
- Drupal 8 allows migrating large datasets seamlessly with a great user experience & design
- With Drupal it was easier to configure flexible and faster subscription handling with various subscription models such as - 1 month, 6 months, 2 years with optimized taxonomy and 90% site being dynamic
- It is easy to manage admin portal with Drupal 8 that serves over 15000 subscription-based teachers
- Utilizing Drupal 8 CMI features helped us streamline deployment process by adopting Acquia platform widely used for Drupal services
- Workflow management for content managing with Drupal 8 was easy and effective.
- Allowed us to automate a few process like display daily almanac, indexing content as an when updated, RSS feeds, sitemap generation
- Allowed us to migrate to another payment gateway from Vindicia to Recurly.
- Drupal 8 also allows for integration with MailChimp, various payment plugins, and graphics modification tool.
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.
