The Weather Channel (weather.com)

Project Goals

• Full migration of Weather.com onto Drupal.
• Integrate (and in certain cases transition from) legacy platforms.
• Significantly reduce hurdles to content generation.
• More efficiently leverage caching to improve load times.
• Decrease time to market for new products and site features.
• Develop in an agile method to meet flexible requirements.

Challenges & Solutions

Scalability and performance: The Weather Channel’s website serves up content that is unique to each user and their region. This, coupled with the high volume of traffic, meant that the website naturally required a lot of resources to be able to be able to function. When it came to architecting the website, every decision had to take into consideration the unique scalability and performance requirements we needed. On the technical side, our approach was to increase cache efficiency by utilizing Javascript and Edge Side Includes (ESI) for client side rendering, and optimizing calls made to the content delivery network (CDN), Akamai.

Content Creation Workflow: The previous editorial workflow forced The Weather Channel content editors to go through a 20+ click process to be able to publish content. To increase the editorial velocity and simplify the user experience for editors, the development team had to not only utilize Drupal’s content creation strategies, but also create a number of novel editorial enhancements, such as:

• Truly Responsive Content: Once editors enter the content for a page on the website, the Drupal system automatically displays the appropriate layout based on the user’s device (desktop, mobile, etc)
• Flexible Page Layouts: We integrated the configuration and layout of Angular widgets into Panels, giving The Weather Channel team complete control over their placement on the page.
• Improved Layout Previews: Editors can make quick, low fidelity previews early in the content creation process, allowing them to review the work without having to publish the content publicly or work with a content server.

Flexible Requirements: Knowing that new requirements would emerge throughout the development process, Mediacurrent and The Weather Channel chose to manage the project in an agile way. We committed to delivering functional elements of the website in each 2 week sprint. We kept both teams in synch every morning in our daily scrum: reporting on the prior day's work, clearing roadblocks, and setting expectations for what would be completed that day. Keeping in close communication and using short feedback cycles allowed us to easily reprioritize our work as requirements evolved.

Final Thoughts
Moving Weather.com to Drupal was a very complex process, which is why The Weather Channel turned to Mediacurrent. Our team was able to predict and provide solutions for numerous potential implementation traps that a generalist digital agency might not have been able to recognize.

By taking the time to understand the requirements and the impact of each decision, Mediacurrent has planned a resilient architecture, allowing both The Weather Channel and Mediacurrent to quickly respond to the changing business needs without major disruptions.

Weather.com serves millions of pages to more than 100 million people each month. The Weather Channel’s move to Drupal shows how complex, content-rich sites benefit from an open, agile platform to deliver an amazing experience for every site visitor.
Dries Buytaert, Acquia CTO and Drupal project creator

Additional Resources
Watch Mediacurrent's Video Interview with Chris Hill, VP Web Development at The Weather Channel.
Watch the Q&A about the Weather.com project at the 2014 Atlanta Drupal Business Summit.