P!nk's site was the first rolled out on Sony Music's new multilingual platform

Over the past two and a half months, Sony Music rolled out some of their top musical artist sites in new multilingual versions based on Drupal 6. P!nk, Beyonce, Britney Spears, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson and The Fray were among the first to go multilingual, with many more on the way.

Before introducing multilingual support, Sony Music had a solid platform built on Drupal 5 from which they delivered dozens of major artist websites with interactive and social networking features. But having their sites in English only presented significant barriers. Going multilingual would allow them to expand fan bases and reach out to new audiences.

In addition to their team of in-house developers and other contractors, Sony Music sponsored CivicActions to improve internationalization support in Drupal, contributing back all development work. CivicActions guided the internationalization of Sony Music's platform and ensured stability as they upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Accomplishing these aims required an intensive focus on reviewing and upgrading the large selection of core and contributed modules Sony Music relies on. Sony Music's investment in improving the Drupal platform demonstrates the sound business case for contributing back.

Here's a summary of how we approached the work and how this project produced internationalization improvements throughout Drupal core and contrib that can be used on any site wanting to serve users in multiple languages and countries.

DrupalCon DC 2009 note: Ben Jeavons and Matthew Saunders of pingVision and Mollee Bauer, founder/owner of Pregnancy.org, will be making a case study presentation of the design and development of Pregnancy.org at 6:00 pm, Wednesday, March 4th at DrupalCon. [See the DrupalCon DC 2009 schedule.] Any videos or supplementary materials from that presentation will be linked here sometime after the presentation.

Since 2001, Pregnancy.org has been an informational and community resource for women about fertility, pregnancy, labor and child care. In November 2008, Pregnancy.org was relaunched in Drupal 6, with a new design and development by pingVision.

The site ran previously in a highly modified version of PHP-Nuke which had gotten so unmanageable that the managers were posting static pages and building navigation just to avoid having to deal with Nuke's increasingly cumbersome quirks. The site was also fitted with several custom "tools," providing special features for site members who were pregnant, wanting to get pregnant, or have babies. Forums on the site ran in vBulletin.

Even with these drawbacks, the site was enjoying high activity by site members, and very good search engine rankings. And yet, with the software the way it was, and the design growing a bit stale, Pregnancy.org founder and CEO Mollee Bauer retained pingVision to implement an entire revamp of the site across the board, from a new logo to the back-end software.

Late in 2008, an idea began to gather steam. The idea was to launch a news website about Canadian motocross, but not just another site that dealt with the industry from a sterile, detached viewpoint. Direct Motocross was born from a passion to create a site that captured the true spirit of Canadian motocross, the grit and the grime and the grease.

Drupal has strong credentials in news websites, so we saw it as an ideal fit. Using Drupal also meant that we could quickly incorporate links to popular social media websites, sophisticated (but intuitive) image handling, and more.

All this planning was taking place against the backdrop of the most severe economic downturn in 80 years, and Drupal made it possible to develop a feature-rich website without requiring an extensive team of developers. What's more, core development took place during a very tight development window, as we wanted the site to launch on Jan 1, 2009.

The Georgia Straight is Canada's largest urban weekly: a Vancouver-based newsmagazine with a per-issue readership of almost 534,000.

Founded in 1967, the paper was critical of local politicians and police and was soon faced with fines for publishing obscenities and police raids. As time went on the "Straight", as locals call it, became more established, but maintained a progressive editorial stance. Straight.com is the newspaper's online presence.

Straight.com, in addition to publishing content from the print publication, is focussed on providing web-exclusive content and building online community. Site content includes special-interest blogs, video and audio, image galleries, and searchable listings for events, restaurants, clubs, and movies.

Background

Before conversion to Drupal, Straight.com used a number of methods and technologies to update the website. Originally static HTML, then outsourced, the Straight ultimately brought site management in-house, moving first to the Publish Button CMS then to a custom Cold Fusion-based content management system.

Row Eleven Wine Company in Marin County, CA came to ISL Consulting determined to create an online store that reflected the many sides of this unique specialty wine producer. It had to both serve the company's immediate objective to sell more wine online and be able to incorporate a number of new features in the coming years.

Requirements

Since the company had a number of specialty wines, at least three separate branding sites were needed, run by the same administrators.

The firm’s founder, Richard de los Reyes, a charismatic winemaker, needed his own blog to share his thoughts and deep knowledge of Napa Valley vintner history.

A single e-commerce shopping cart was needed to integrate products across all brands. Finally, the platform needed to be able to incorporate the first of a growing list of community features, and be expandable in the future to service the needs of the firm’s many distributors and restaurants in the coming years.

ISL recommended Drupal because it would allow, with a little training, largely non-technical managers to run the website. The registration system could allow Row Eleven to begin building relationships with its community of customers and re-sellers.

Thanks to the work of numerous people through free time contributions, our upgrade sprint in Cambridge, MA, and several testing and bugfixing hours committed by the community, today we were finally ready to make the jump and upgrade drupal.org to Drupal 6. Our site runs several interesting modules, many of which receive little love outside our infrastructure, plus we are running on multiple database servers and webservers with several other helper components in the backend. So while we crafted a fine plan for the upgrade, it took a few more hours then originally planned.