The Student Room (TSR) is the world’s largest online student community with over 1.8 million members.
The content management solution (CMS) was not a dedicated CMS solution but had been created using the same open source software that powered their forums and was no longer considered fit for purpose. TSR needed a new CMS that would work alongside their other technologies and offer enhanced tools for managing high volumes of user generated content
About the project
Goals
With so much content being contributed by community members, TSR needed a solution that would offer robust privilege based access and include moderation and approval workflows.
The new CMS needed to integrate with their forums, ad serving tools and Single Sign On solution.
TSR were also looking for an open source solution based on object orientated PHP so that their existing development team could take over the ongoing operational management of the site.
Requirements
miggle delivered the new CMS with the following features:
The Single Sign On was maintained with no need for customers or site admins to re-register. The user experience of logging in remained seamless throughout.
High functioning workflow and controls for moderating and approving content across a platform with multiple contributors assigned with different permission levels.
An interactive workflow that allows site admins and contributors to communicate with each other throughout the content publishing process
A system of user levels that enables premium users to have superior editing features, e.g. universities have the opportunity to manage their own content, embed links to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, display a google map of the university location as well as create image and video galleries which pull through to their page.
Interface with an external widget system so reviews and latest posts around the site can be pulled in and displayed (where user permissions apply)
Outcome
The Student Room gained operational freedom through working collaboratively with miggle. Our Drupal experts have trained the TSR developers in as much Drupal specifics as they need to continue to manage the new site for themselves. The concept of operational freedom has been passed on to the TSR community members by offering them a truly self-service content marketing platform to showcase their material.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal 8 made sense as their preferred solution. TSR had an in-house team of PHP developers who were used to working with PHP based frameworks such as Symphony, which is a key part of Drupal 8. Also, given the other technologies used across the site, the fact that Drupal 8 could be used in a headless or decoupled way was key.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
To complete some of the site's objectives we built out a variety of custom modules. One of the biggest objectives for the site is to allow their members to generate content, as part of this the content should go through a review process. To meet the requirements we took the Workflow modules and extended them. As well as workflow we required entity revisioning, the current Drupal module wasn’t available for Drupal 8 at the time of development so we rebuilt the module for Drupal 8. The revisioning module integrates with the workflow additions we had to make.
