SmartBrief is a leading digital B2B media company. SmartBrief delivers each day's most relevant industry news to more than 5.8 million senior executives, thought leaders and informed industry professionals. The website serves up a snapshot of each day's top industry news and allows readers to dig deeper into trending topics. SmartBrief publishes more than 200 niche email newsletters in partnership with leading trade associations and professional societies.

Why Drupal was chosen: 

Drupal is the CMS of choice when it comes to media-rich and high-content websites, especially for websites that encounter heavy traffic. The CMS framework is robust, secure and extremely scalable, and well-suited for news websites.

The ever-growing size and constant updates of the Drupal community guaranteed that it would be easy to consistently update our client’s website to keep it up to date technically.

Drupal’s search capabilities coupled with ‘Apache Solr’ allows to create an integrated approach to the complex project explorer functionality that was required for the project.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Project Requirements:

Content creation and content management

  1. Content display - For an elevated content viewing experience
  2. Ad management
  3. Customized solutions and integrations for subscription, adding geolocation maps for events, RSS Feed and more.

Content Creation:

Being a media website, smooth content creation and management were prerequisites for SmartBrief.

We used the CKEditor module which allows simplified and faster website content creation. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which means that text edited in it looks almost the same as that of what end users would experience when it is published. To improve the visibility (indexing) and ease in finding contents (search), we used ‘Apache Solr Search’ module.

Content Display:

The primary aim of the website is to provide a good user experience to their readers. To make this happen, the ‘Views’ module was used by us. This module paved way to create, display and sort all the latest contents by classifying them into different categories. ‘Views’ module provided the flexibility to display the site's content in a block, table, page or in any other format preferred.

AD Management:

The ‘DFP’ module integrates Google Publisher Tags (GPT) as supported by the new Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP).

Custom Functionalities Built:

We built custom functionalities for some of the modules to improve user experience and visual appeal:

Subscription:

We developed a subscription module to allow users to search and subscribe to Newsletters published for different industries in an easier way.

Geolocation maps for Events:

The site also has an events section. The problem is that, users do not know the longitude and latitude of the event location. To solve this, we created a custom module to display maps in the event pages to indicate the exact location of the event.

Other Notable tasks:

RSS Feeds, Media Kit Download, Google DFP, Integration with social services, Facebook Pixel and Amazon Alexa, Custom theme development and ReCaptcha implementation.

Performance:

As a server solution, we used Linux CentOS with Apache as the server application. This configuration renders great performance results. However, we also used a Varnish caching system that stores almost every page on the website. This turned out to be a great solution because anonymous users contributed a majority of the website’s traffic.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Recaptcha:

We used the Recaptcha module to add SPAM protection on the comment fields. This demanded us to use Drupal’s core commenting system with the new Recaptcha because there was no third party commenting system available.

Views:

The Views module was used for listing contents in a website.

Omega theme:

We used Omega theme for creating a custom theme for the website. In addition, we also used the SASS module, which significantly reduced the development time in fabricating the theme.

CTools:

We used CTools as a dependency for ‘Views’ Module. CTools work in collaboration with ‘Views’ to build pages. CTools is a module suite that contains the ‘Page Manager’ module. CTools manages pages, and contains tools like exportables which provides export interfaces and, content wrappers for accepting content inputs.

Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP):

We used Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) module that provides an interface to DFP which is an advertisement software application run by Google.

Organizations involved: 
smart-brief-home
smartbrief-bussiness
smartbrief-subcription
Sectors: 
Community
Enterprise
Entertainment
Media
Publishing