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By Icreon on
The OCVC Group was formed in the UK in 2011 between Oxford & Cherwell Valley College and Reading College. They also have a partnership with UTC Reading, a University Technical College. In 2014, the educational conglomerate will also become the lead education partner for UTC Oxfordshire.
Before undertaking this new project, OCVC was using multiple CMS frameworks to manage a group of sites. Different administration modules, different frontend themes, and different user workflows all to manage similar processes around updating large quantities of marketing and educational content.
The lack of single point of access to editorial content hindered the conglomerate’s ability to push out integrated marketing efforts at a massive level, making it difficult to deliver information, updates, and data with reliability and speed to the user base. This resulted in completely rethinking the group’s entire digital strategy – and accepting that a new framework for Content Management would be the only way to better connect for the upcoming years.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The internal IT Staff of OCVC backed our recommendation for Drupal for a variety of reasons
• Costs: Drupal is inherently free
• Multi-domain capable: At the very least, 4 separate domains needed to be powered by the same content management environment
• Customized workflows: Rapid development of content management and publishing workflows
• Inherently Social: A robust community of social plugins
• Powerful Webform-ation: The ability to create multi-step application form that could be versioned onto a node dynamically
• Scalable: Enterprise traffic scale with inbuilt caching systems and third party cache support through Varnish & Memcache
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Goals and Requirements of the New System
There was always one overarching ‘requirement’ for the new system: create an enterprise-level CMS for that provides an improved web experience for student, employers and staff. That said, the following were key points to executing on this:
• Provide the ability to manage site content easily through backend.
• Create the multiple workflows required for content teams to publish information
• Develop a centralized backend system to manage each site’s content.
• Handle online applications
• Perform well under a large amount of traffic.
• Design a simple and easy backend interface for non-technical team
• Integrate with MS Dynamics to fetch all course relevant data for the CMS.
• Give non-technical members the ability to create and dynamically edit webforms
• Add easy ways for people to interact via Social Media
• Promote the College to all its target audience through integrated digital marketing
• Rebrand the visual identity of all college sites.
The Outcome of the New System
From a technical perspective, Icreon’s Drupal team developed a multi-domain enterprise-grade CMS for students, employers and staff that support publication types like online news, events, articles, course data, academic track information, and online application assets.
The new CMS manages content for 4 college sites from a centralized backend system - each with a customized look and feel that can dynamically generate different views of the same existing content based on their domain destination.
Using SOAP, the CMS also fetches and stores course information from a MS Dynamics ERP. Future iterations of development have been optimized so that OCVC can directly write application form data from the CMS into the CRM component of the ERP directly.
Other Key Features:
• User-friendly content architecture: Backend users can easily manage site content through organized content types, taxonomies, blocks and custom modules.
• Photo Albums and Carousels: There are different types of image carousels and photo galleries implemented in site.
• Custom Theming: The frontend theme was custom developed and uses CSS sprites and font libraries and managed by a SaaS framework.
• Custom Course Search: A customized course search exists in the site that is built on jQuery/JSON/AJAX.
• Custom Workflows – A modified version of the Workflow module triggers complex user actions and validations to publish content.
Hosting architecture
The hosting infrastructure was created based on past visitor usage data and expected spikes in mobile usage:
• CentOS 6.x
• Multiple Web Servers with Installed Apache, Varnish, Memcache and APC
• DB Server
• LSYNCD for File Sync
• Cloud Load Balancer
Caching Systems:
• Drupal Cache
• Varnish
• Memcache
• APC
The Overview:
A load balancer with multiple web / Varnish servers distributes site traffic on the backend. This setup is duplicated on a second system with a complete file replication mechanism in place using Lsynchd. Each web server connects to centralized DB Server which is backup on regular interval.
Varnish serves as an http accelerator, and we have built a custom module called Varnish Purge URL to purge specific pages cache from backend. APC is used to optimize intermediate PHP code as well. Because the sites receive high traffic loads, deep server level system configurations have been made to handle TCP Port exhaustion.
Completed Project URLs:
http://www.activatelearning.ac.uk/
http://www.reading-college.ac.uk/
http://www.cityofoxford.ac.uk/
http://www.banbury-bicester.ac.uk/
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
These modules are only a sample of the most important components within this project, but provided a solid framework for most of the site's infrastructure and helped to setup a user friendly CMS application. Miscellaneous components such as Drush and Xdebugger were also used in the development of the site.
Community contributions:
We are shaping a custom module MS dynamic CRM API created in this project for contribution. We will share this module link here soon after posting this module at drupal.org
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Icreon Communication Pvt Ltd.
Icreon UK Ltd.
Cantata Limited
Activate Learning Group (formerly Oxford and Cherwell Valley Group)
Sectors:
Education
