Greenbook Data Solutions

By Valuebound on 26 February 2018

Valuebound helped Farm Journal Media’s Greenbook to provide its end users with a user-friendly interface. Greenbook caters specifically to the North American region with 800 manufacturers listing ten thousand labels. Valuebound migrated this directory based site from a legacy based system to new architecture based on Drupal 8 for easy search of information, highly categorized indexing with options like active ingredient contained, label, crop, manufacturer, pest and so on.

Farm Journal Media is America’s leading business information and media company serving the agricultural market. Started 139 years ago with the pre-eminent Farm Journal magazine, the company serves the row crop, livestock, produce and retail sectors through 26 branded websites, e-newsletters and phone apps; 11 business magazines; 70 events; six nationally broadcasted television and radio programs; a robust mobile text marketing business; and an array of data-driven paid information products.

Greenbook is owned and maintained by the Farm Journal Media. For more than 30 years Greenbook has collected, maintained, and disseminated the most useful plant protection chemical dataset available. Working in direct cooperation with pesticide companies Greenbook transforms product labeling into indexed, actionable data in an unbiased presentation, that is easily accessible.

Visit greenbook.net →

Why Drupal was chosen:

The aim was to build a new label management system from the custom database Greenbook had been maintaining, for a superior authoring experience for the editors and a robust search system for its end users. Greenbook needed to deliver a website that would have data searchable by label, pest, manufacturer, pest and so on. It also needed to display latest news searchable by topic.

The were many motivations behind choosing Drupal 8 as it came bundled with following benefits-

Open source
Role-based access
User relationships
Content authoring experience
Workflow
User-friendly
Optimization
Scalability

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Greenbook works with pesticide, herbicide and fungicide manufacturers to convert product labels into actionable data.

Key Approach and Features

Valuebound took up the challenge with an aim of migrating the website from a 30-year-old custom built database with more than 250,000 records
The team built it with configurable data input filter for advanced searches
Greenbook also needed the CMS to be personalized, have a complete end to end workflow for content moderation from creating to publishing the content with customized and role-based user dashboard.
Daily fetching of huge data records from external server made efficient and simple to reduce time

Technical Excellence

Migrated tagged content and user info without any hassle from Wordpress to Drupal
Database built in Drupal 8 to fetch more than 250,000 of records from old database
Built a new site enabling registration with login save preference, tailor made for a personalized experience to upload data-sheets from manufacturers
Enabled search systems for multiple language data sheets provided by manufacturers
Equipped the website for news and information handling with built-in categories for classification like crop protection
Deployed an API based content architecture to fetch and consume curated news from editor
Custom built content workflow and tag based authoring space internally accessible to editors
Unique tracking system for analysing user impressions and view counts
Sponsored label system for highlighting featured labels
Drill down filters for contextual result filtering
Provided an external search widget, enabling users in other sites to reach Greenbook search page

Project Outcome

In terms of deployment timeframe, we were successful in reaching the target and the project only took 8 weeks of development time. We extensively used the Drupal 8 Configuration Management to have a synchronized configuration across all instances. We used Bootstrap custom layouts for nodes and views to get the desired structure for theming.

Technical specifications

Drupal version:

Drupal 8.x

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Brightcove Video Connect

Entityqueue

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

Ultimate Cron: Greenbook fetches data from external API. Daily cron jobs are set to update labels and news info in greenbook. Greenbook relies on Ultimate cron module to run cron jobs individually in parallel using configurable rules, pool management and load balancing.

Search API Solr: Greenbook has a large amount of data. These data are indexed to a solr server inorder to make the search operation smoother and easier. Greenbook relies on Search API Solr module for connecting to the backend solr server.

Profile: Greenbook allows users to set preferences for Labels. These preference are handled using user profiles.

Organizations involved:

Team members: