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By peyman_6000 on
Why Drupal was chosen:
custom content management system (CMS) and was open to suggestions. The firm’s marketing team wanted a CMS that would support the desired front-end aesthetic while also providing a user-friendly back-end admin experience. After the site's wireframes were finished it was evident to us that Drupal would be our proposed solution. With related projects, news stories, and people appearing throughout the site, Drupal's entity system, Views, Entity Reference, and Media modules were a perfect fit.
Technical specifications
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Content Administration
Ease of use for content administrators was a high priority, so our go-to modules of Field Collection, Field Group, Custom Publishing Options, Auto Entity Label, Date Popup Authored, Entity Reference, Linkit, and Nodequeue were integral to the success of the site's content management. We also used Remote Stream Wrapper, which allows Wight to use Vimeo-hosted MP4 files on the Home Page slideshow in addition to self-hosted MP4 files.
Permissions
Closely related to CMS usability is the fine-grain control of user permissions. We knew what Wight would have multiple content contributors, so we needed to prevent certain blocks from being moved and certain pages from being added to the wrong menus. The Block Access, Advanced Menu, Taxonomy Access Fix, View Unpublished, Shortcut per Role, RoleAssign, and Better Formats modules lock down these respective sections of the admin so that each user role only sees exactly what they need and nothing more. In addition to minimizing room for error, these permissions have the added benefit of presenting a much cleaner and easier-to-understand interface for content administrators.
Optimization
Fast load time was a necessity for this site, even with all of the large images and videos displayed on various pages. We employed many layers of caching to aid in the overall speed of the site including APC, Memcache, Nginx, the Speedy module, and the Entity cache module. We used the ImageAPI Optimize module to ensure that the smallest possible image files are uploaded. JPG/JPEG files are run through both jpegtran and jpegoptim, and PNG files are run through pngquant, optipng, and pngcrush.
Miscellaneous
The News section of the site allows visitors to view category- and tag-filtered pages. These pages are generated by Views and Taxonomy Display modules since Views alone will 404 on taxonomy items with a non-alphanumeric character in the URL (when using clean URLs).
Sectors:
Small business
