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By jorgenson_chris on
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the largest general science membership organization in the world with several publications and an extensive web presence. In addition to thousands, upon thousands of articles and assets that must be easily located by online visitors and employees, AAAS Science Careers has a large number of authors, editors, and other non-technical staff who must contribute, review and approve content for their online publications. AAAS is getting it all done with Drupal.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal was chosen to serve as the content management system (CMS) for AAAS Science Careers to deliver added control, functionality and agility. AAAS Science Careers is part of a larger AAAS site and as such needed to maintain the existing style and branding of that site while expanding upon the feature set available to increase usability and control. AAAS recognized the flexibility of the Drupal platform, and the potential to seamlessly integrate into a wider system, along with its ability to manage large amounts of content in its selection of Drupal as its CMS.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Goals
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an international non-profit organi-zation dedicated to the advancement of science around the world. As part of that leadership, AAAS is instrumental in disseminating information pertaining to science-related policies, programs, educational and employment opportunities. In order to better fulfill its mission, AAAS needed added control and functionality for its Science Careers site, including the automation and standardization of content contribution with appropriate permissions and workflows based on user role, better organization of content and media for greater access and sharing, improved search capabilities, and an ability to scale as they grow with an eye toward building a Drupal-based data repository capable of handling AAAS’ enterprise content management needs.
Requirements
The development of the AAAS Science Careers site required a complete migration from its previous CMS to Drupal. This involved migrating content via Unleashed Technologies’ custom XML importer. The importer moved all content from XML to Drupal, matching fields and eliminating errant code with no data loss or accuracy compromised. All in all, more than 16,000 entries were migrated.
An additional challenge was the requirement to migrate content from the AAAS Science Careers site only and not impact any other section of the much larger AAAS site. In addition to the full migration, enhancements were made in order to enable AAAS to:
- Automate and streamline production processes
- Add and fully manage a variety of content types via CMS, with the ability to edit nested content types, adding new author information that populates sitewide, without leaving the WYSIWYG for the associated article
- Empower visitors to find exactly what they are looking for with Solr smart search
- Ensure the capture of visitor contact information via Eloqua integration
- Deliver a highly functioning and seamlessly integrated experience to web visitors
- Provide a superior user experience with sub-two second load times
- Promote the proliferation of AAAS content by providing social media sharing options
As part of the larger AAAS web presence, the Science Careers website was required to maintain the current style, branding and functionality of the main site while expanding upon the feature set to enable AAAS to increase usability and control for Science Careers.
Outcome
AAAS now has a robust and highly flexible platform from which to manage their Science Careers website. The AAAS Science Careers site is seamlessly integrated into the larger AAAS site, yet delivers the enhanced functionality need to successfully maintain and grow Science Careers. Included in the many advancements delivered with the new Drupal platform are:
- An agile content management system that enables external authors and AAAS staff to contribute content with strict work flows to ensure accurate moderation and publication practices
- Scalable structure with content, media and meta data versioning with highly organized taxonomies
- Reduction of manual effort with the ability to populate articles quickly via robust WYSIWYG editing ensuring consistency of code and design
- Comprehensive integration into the larger AAAS web presence as well as Eloqua to provide a superior experience, enable marketing efforts and drive engagement
- High performance availability with fully optimized web pages to support sub-two second load times
The AAAS’ Science Career’s site was developed with Drupal best practices to deliver the fea¬tures, control and agility needed today while building a solid foundation for future enhancements.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Drupal 7 was chosen for this site because of its enhanced feature set and highly flexible capabilities. The custom theme was used in order to maintain pixel-level accuracy when integrating the design of the AAAS Science Careers site into the main AAAS site. Though not an exhaustive list, the following modules were essential to the success of the AAAS Science Careers site:
- Apache Solr Search - Solr delivers superior search results quickly to online visitors. Unleashed Technologies uses Solr in conjunction with several other search modules (i.e. Search API Autocomplete) to customize and further enhance search functionality and results.
- Views – The Views module enhances the user interface by allowing us to display a large amount of content. Custom reporting functionality was built from Views, enabling AAAS to save reports, filter, and create new reports.
- WYSYWG - This module was used to allow the administrators and editors of content on the AAAS Science Careers site to use WYSYWG fields to easily access content and other information that is stored in the site’s database in order to display that content wherever on the site they wish. This use and reuse of content keeps correlations intact but opens up many possibilities for online display.
- Workbench – AAAS Science Careers required a good amount of process workflows to be incorporated into their site for publishing content. Workbench provided dashboards for different user levels across the site, giving each user a view into the content they are responsible for by permission level.
- Media – This module is a robust media manager, enabling AAAS to easily find images for reuse based on the tags associated with that file. All caption and credit information is automatically pulled for each image.
- Custom Media Revisioning – This custom module allows AAAS to create revisions of media files that include all meta data edits as well as file updates.
- Feeds – Feeds imports content from their online magazine to be displayed on the AAAS Science Careers site.
- Varnish and Memcache – AAAS Science Careers is optimized using Varnish and Memcache modules to boost performance and manage high volumes of content and transactions without affecting load times.
- Eloqua – Integration into the Eloqua platform was essential for AAAS to have fully functioning forms and automated marketing.
Sectors:
Non-profit
Publishing
