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By OpenSense Labs on
From building sustainable organisations to strengthening the capacity of a superabundance of media professionals, human rights activists and information entrepreneurs, Internews has been very influential. As an international non-profit organisation, it has been bringing top-notch news to people around the world and helping them make informed decisions. In order to help journalists from developing countries to do efficacious coverage on the environment, Internews built the Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
As one of the pioneers in the media and publishing industry, Internews built EJN to work towards the improvement of quantity and quality of environmental reporting. But their digital presence had significant issues to be sorted out.
To leave an imprint in the digital media and publishing sector, your website should have all the ingredients to be doing exceedingly well. But EJN, whose erstwhile website was running on a Python-based CMS, it was hugely challenging to be at their best with the limited features and functionalities that the CMS offered. Efficient content governance was one of the biggest challenges. There was no ease of content creation and handling various types of content was arduous. In short, the difficulties in creating and managing content had to be fixed.
This is where Drupal came to the rescue. OpenSense Labs helped with the redressal of the EJN’s website by migrating the site to Drupal 8 and improving content governance on the site as a result.
Why Drupal was chosen:
- Availability of right set of core features and contributed modules that are required for the media and publishing industry.
- Ultimate flexibility in adding any type of content.
- Great set of SEO modules to choose from for keeping a check on search engine rankings.
- Drupal’s migration modules that allowed for frictionless migration from Python-based CMS to Drupal 8.
- Remarkable scope for design improvements
- Fantastic support for handling of the enormous amount of media with the availability of Media Library in the core
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Goals and requirements
- Earth Journalism Network had a surfeit of different types of content on its website like the news articles, videos, content with forms etc. And the Python-based CMS, on which the site was running, had to be migrated to Drupal 8 to streamline the content editing process.
- Content workflow had to be improved to allow editors to choose what goes on the website for the end users
- EJN staffs had to have permission to grant scholarships and support to fellow journalists by leveraging the webform and time-based expiry of these grants/opportunities to create a competitive environment
- Embedding of Maps was needed to be implemented.
- Drag and drop management was required to dynamically choose the structure of certain group of pages
Processes and solutions
Simplified content workflow
Layout Builder module in Drupal core has been an exciting prospect for content authors, developers and Drupal Community. It’s provision for flexible admin interface and contextual links feels natural. On utilising Layout Builder in this project, OpenSense Labs were able to keep our structured data. It allowed for fielded content on the backend and a marvellous drag-and-drop, front-end editing experience.
Simply put, using Layout Builder enhanced authoring experience to a great extent. It works exactly the way today’s users expect, that is, content editors require less time to get equipped with it. Even Drupalists could preview changes immediately.
Moreover, Drupal’s provision for the addition of all types of content came in handy. It gave the flexibility to introduce a new type of content as well. And, it’s the stupendous content workflow of Drupal that proved immensely beneficial for the content editors. It enabled the editors to view at what stage their content is in (for instance, creation to review to publication) and ensured streamlined management of user accounts too. For instance, users from different parts of the world could apply for opportunities. This application process was simplified by Drupal as it determined precise deadlines for different users based on their location and timezone.
Utilisation of essential Drupal modules
Most of the features and functionalities that a digital media company’s website requires, could be built easily using the right combination of Drupal core offerings and the contributed modules. There just wasn’t any need for looking elsewhere. Even custom module development was almost negligible. These were the important Drupal modules that lent remarkable support:
- Improving SEO was one of the main objectives and it was important for keeping a check on search engine rankings. Drupal provided a wonderful set of modules like Metatag, Pathauto, Redirect, Schema.org Metatag, Google Analytics and XML Sitemap to do that easily.
- Migration modules in Drupal also ensured frictionless migration from Python-based CMS to Drupal 8.
- Media Library in Drupal core solved the intricacies related to media management and gave fantastic support for handling the enormous amount of media. The media content that has been migrated from the previous version and the media content that has been newly generated could be easily governed.
- From simple to multi-page ones, Webform module was leveraged to create any kind of form.
- For enhancing frontend performance, modules like Purge, CloudFare and CSS/JS Aggregation were useful.
- To take care of website search experience, Search API and Facets modules were used.
- For a perfect slideshow/ carousel solution, Slick Carousel was used.
Outcome
- Migration to Drupal was the perfect choice in the end as it gave the flexibility to add any type of content and made the life of content editors easier than what it was.
- Migration from a Python-based CMS to Drupal happened smoothly due to the availability of migration modules in Drupal.
- Remarkable design improvements were done.
- Even after migration, SEO health didn’t get affected and actually saw improvement due to the combination of Drupal’s SEO modules.
- From creating any sort of web forms to achieving high frontend performance and improving the search experience to building carousels, Drupal made everything possible.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
- From simple to multi-page ones, Webform module was leveraged to create any kind of forms.
- For enhancing frontend performance, modules like Purge, CloudFare and CSS/JS Aggregation were useful.
- To further improve SEO rankings, Metatag, Pathauto, Redirect, Schema.org Metatag, Google Analytics and XML Sitemap were utilised.
- To take care of website search experience, Search API and Facets modules were used.
- For a perfect slideshow/ carousel solution, Slick Carousel was used.
- Layout Builder was used for drag and drop management
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Media
