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By Myplanet on
Myplanet has developed a communication and collaboration solution for enterprise and service provider customers. With the launch of RelayRobin and an ever-growing customer base, we needed a simple and easy-to-access place to distribute software updates to our customers. It had to be a secure portal that was able to manage multiple user accounts across multiple customers and supporting multiple releases of the software at once. As this was a portal we were building for ourselves, the only company participating in it at the development stage was Myplanet. Of course, any current and future carrier customers will ultimately be participants as well.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal is our preferred CMS framework—it’s undeniably one of the best frameworks available and it’s the one we know the best and use most often. When we started this project we immediately knew we wanted to work with Drupal and most particularly, to take the opportunity to explore Drupal 8.
We chose Drupal in part because the community is so large: we knew there would be extensive API support and lots of opportunity to glean knowledge from others. We’re also huge proponents of open source, so Drupal appeals to us on that level as well. And the variety of modules and themes available gives us flexibility and customization options that adapt to our specific needs and enables the kind of rapid deployment we favour.
We’re also always impressed by a CMS framework that offers SEO friendly, mobile-ready options out of the box. Responsive functionality was a key component of this project, as users of the new support portal would very likely need to access it from anywhere on any device, so Drupal 8’s improved offerings on that score were a huge boon as well.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
We’ve developed a business communication platform in-house at Myplanet and now that it’s on the market, we needed for a support portal where multiple customers could download software across a secure and easy-to-use site was pressing. So our primary goal was to build an easy distribution channel for our customers.
As a secondary goal for our development team, this project was a prime opportunity to play around with, learn about, explore and get to know the new Drupal 8. Oleksii Semko, one of the lead developers on the project, says “This project was a great opportunity for us to gain as much experience in D8 as possible.”
Because we were creating a site with ourselves as the primary stakeholders, we had a prime opportunity for getting up to speed with the changes in the platform. The differences between D7 and D8 are substantial, so the new opportunities and new specialties that working with it has brought have been a big part of the excitement for us. As our first D8 project, this was a special one for us. And now we can bring the new expertise to our clients.
When it came to project management, it was a little unorthodox. “I think we used an extreme approach” says Semko. Because this was a project we were working on for ourselves, it was done in two stages when there was a window between client projects. There were no design specs laid out, but rather a generalized outline of requirements with specifics that changed along the way. The team worked extremely lean and extremely agile to get it all done, pivoting between stage 1 and 2 as the needs of the portal itself changed.
In the end, the site came together. Myplanet’s RelayRobin customers now have an easy to use site to download software upgrades with the potential to expand its functionality down the line. And the added bonus of our development team having expanded the scope of their Drupal expertise to include D8 is perk that will continue to pay dividends in our future work.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
In choosing ZURB Foundation as our theme, we were choosing a powerful front-end framework that allowed us to rapidly build a user interface. It also has a wide-range of modular and flexible components, which appealed to us because we knew we could customize it to our needs easily, using the elements we preferred and eliminating components we didn’t want.
Because we used such a robust theme, we didn’t actually end up needing very many module additions. The one we did choose to include was the Admin Toolbar module, which is a very convenient module in D8. The improvements it offered over the basic functionality of the default Admin Toolbar—like the drop-down upgrade—made a big difference in usability for our needs.
Community contributions:
Part of why we love Drupal is the massive community available for support and knowledge share. This being our first foray into Drupal 8, it was mostly a learning project for us and unfortunately, the scope of the project didn’t allow for much in the way of new contributions from us. We’re eagerly looking forward to our next project, so we can expand the possibilities of D8 through our client work and contribute back into the Drupal community at large.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Phase 1:
- Aleksey Tsulun
- Anna Tsulun
- Anna Sunko
- Anastasia Dziabura
- Yuriy Zvyagintcev
- Pavel Zheldak
- Oleksii Semko
Phase 2:
- Anna Sunko
- Anastasia Dziabura
- Yuriy Zvyagintcev
- Oleksii Semko
Sectors:
Technology
Telecommunications
