Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By inkovic on
Apex Action is a digital strategy consultancy based in Melbourne, Australia that leverages technology and applies practical thinking to help grow your business online.
Now discovering his true calling in Search Engine Optimisation, digital strategy consultant Peter Macinkovic spends his time consulting with clients on digital strategy – helping them thrive in previously unchartered waters. Peter is also an avid Drupal site-builder, being nominated for the 2014 Blue Drop Awards for 'Best Entertainment Website' (Live on Bowen).
In leaving behind the agency life, the Apex Action website needed to be fast, well structured and open to ongoing modifications on a monthly basis as new features are rolled out on an iterative basis - making Drupal the ideal publishing platform for the website.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Having used Drupal 7 since 2011-12, Drupal was chosen due to the rich module library and sophisticated functionality - all without even writing a line a PHP.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Goals
The goal of the 'Apex Action' website is to create an intelligent and well-structured website that helps present content to serve prospective clients for the consultancy.
As the consultancy is new, they website will need to be continuously updated and developed post-launch with new content structure appropriate to available content (i.e. Testimonials, Products, Blog which were not available for initial launch.)
Challenges and Solutions
Challenges in producing the website included:
- Planning content in a flexible manner for reuse and re-imagining.
- Ensure that page load is fast to improve search engine placement and conversion optimisation.
- Content structure that related with other content within the information architecture.
- Responsive layout to help cater the experience
Thanks to Drupal an it's wealth of modules planning the Apex Action website and making adjustments to the website post launch were easy and delivered great visibility for a new player in the game.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Theme
The 'Apex Action' website was built on the Omega 4 theme with a customizable sub-theme of Omega. Omega was chosen as a base theme due to its powerful control over layouts in Drupal (via Context Omega), as well as some nice extras (Singularity, Compass, Libraries).
Used in combination with Omega Context, individual layouts were created for pages for different url patterns and node types. Used in conjunction with the Singularity Grid Framework this provided maximum flexibility to serve pages suitable for any context.
Display Suite
To control the presentation of the wide variety of content types, the Display Suite module was used to ensure fields of content added by the administrator is placed correctly to fit the layout of the page. This allowed control of node filed and rest of tpl files to 'de-drupal-fy' many of the default display mechanisms of Drupal.
Image URL Formatter and Sub-pathauto
Great utility modules for Drupal formats and path aliasing.
Image URL Formatter allows for file fields that contain images to be formatted to the path of an image. This is key in creating a background-image in a contextual view for nice presentation for content headers.
Sub Pathauto helps connect the dots when path aliasing an extension of an aliased url. For example, /node/46 maybe aliased to /blog/blog-post-title/, but without sub-path aliasing a contextual view set to /blog/%/contextual-field would not work.
Views
As with many projects based on Drupal, Views solves many issues for display by displaying and referencing other content in a View. This is used throughout in displaying lists of episodes, lists of guests and the contextual filter of Views is used to display specific content when appropriate.
TB Mega Menu
TB Mega Menu is one of my favourite Mega Menu modules and is an really idiot proof management system for displaying menus.
Because the Apex Action website is less rich than previous website's I have done, I had to overwrite the default CSS for the Mega Menu. For the mobile context, the Responsive Menus module takes over to serve the mobile use case.
Boost and Speedy
Getting the website production ready was ensuring performance was stellar. The caching, minification and aggregation capabilities of these modules in conjunction with Drupal's default cache options drastically improved server response time and page load, making the website a breeze to use on mobile connections without resorting to complex responsive images with CSS.
Team members:
Sectors:
Small business
