AskMe is a one-stop destination where visitors can find information related to anything—restaurants, travel, matrimony, jobs, education, mobile, gadgets, etc. AskMe has an extensive directory of information from across India that is both accurate as well as diverse. Users can access this information in print, online or mobile formats, or through phone calls. The online listing can be accessed at askme.com.

To offer greater engagement and easy content sharing among users, AskMe created different community websites across multiple verticals such as Fashion, Weddings, Home Interiors, Education,Travel and so on.

Why Drupal was chosen: 

AskMe team had the objective to get more users on their websites. With a revamped marketing strategy, AskMe needed websites that could handle multi-fold increase in traffic, and allow their admins and bloggers to put content easily. The existing websites built on Joomla were not built for scaling traffic nor did it have features to enable easy upload of content.

The AskMe team learned that Drupal would allow them to add features they needed easily through modules. They explored Drupal and were convinced that it would be the perfect fit to manage content and sustain the high levels of traffic. Also, from the perspective of custom development (categorised forums, user activity tracking, single sign on), AskMe found that Drupal was a better fit.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 
  • Content Creation: AskMe community has multiple websites, and all of them required a lot of content to drive engagement. We used CKEditor module which allows for simplified and faster website content creation. This module replaces textarea fields with CKEditor. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which means that text edited in it looks as similar as possible to the end result that users will see after the document is published.
    To monitor the content, we installed custom modules Stop Broken Link in Body, which allows editors/content publishers to check that an embedded link is valid before publishing the content, and Restrict Abusive Words module which prevents users from entering abusive words from an admin generated list.
    Save Form State module was used to provide a way to auto save data entered in any Drupal form even before the form is actually submitted. This helps if the user is writing an article or a comment and the browser crashes or the power goes down, or even if the window is closed accidentally.
  • Registration System: All the sites have different domains. But to simplify user experience, it was decided that a user on one community website should not have to register and sign in again at the other community websites. Once a user registers or signs in at any one AskMe community website, they should automatically be made a member on the other sites as well. We implemented a single sign-on system for this.
    To make the process more convenient for the user, Email Registration module was used to register and login users with their email address instead of using a separate username in addition to the email address. To allow users to connect through their Facebook accounts, we used Simple FB Connect. For publishing and sending newsletters to the lists of subscribers, Simplenews module was installed. We wanted to ensure that only valid email accounts would be registered. This was taken care of by the Stop spam domain registrations module.
  • User Engagement: The primary purpose of the AskMe website was to encourage users to engage with the content. A point system was implemented using the User Points module, which allows users to collect points depending on their activity on the website. The more they engage and participate in forums and contests, the more points they collect. These points can then be redeemed at AskMe’s marketplace, which has many online shopping partners.

    User Points in Askmeonwellness

    Since Drupal provides various modules and distributions for user engagement, we were able to easily build the website using these. Here we used Voting API, a framework for content voting and rating systems in Drupal, and Site map module, which provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of the site.

    Sitemap

  • Sharing and Notifications: One of the key elements that was missing in the previous CMS version used by AskMe was the sharing and notifications functionality on the website. Drupal has metatags that can help control the summary content that is used within social networks when visitors link to your site, particularly the Open Graph submodule for use with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

    Sharing in AskmeonFashion

  • Site Visibility: The AskMe team wanted the content to be easily searchable on the Internet. We used XML sitemap for this purpose. XML Sitemap automatically creates a sitemap that informs search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date.
  • Site Maintenance: Considering the massive amounts of content and the high levels of traffic that AskMe would draw, maintenance and performance were critical. Drupal has modules which fulfil this requirement. To handle the traffic, we used Varnish module which allows integration between the Drupal site and the Varnish HTTP Accelerator, an advanced and very fast reverse-proxy system.

    We also used Apache Solr module, which integrates Drupal with the Apache Solr search platform. Solr search can be used as a replacement for core content search, and offers both extra features and better performance. For caching purpose, we implemented memcache and CAPTCHA module.

    Search

  • Integrations with partner portals: One of the key revenue generators for AskMe is their partnerships with tier-1 e-commerce companies. The websites have a shopping link that pulls up relevant listings from partner websites as well as those from askme.com. In the earlier version of the websites, this was done through iFrames, which meant that AskMe could not display the products in their own web layouts. With Drupal, AskMe can now have the products showcased as part of their web pages. Relevant deals are also pulled from askme.com listings.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

These modules were found to be apt for the kind of site we wanted to build. The availability of these modules decreased our overall time spent.

Organizations involved: 
Project team: 

Srijan is today the largest pure-play Drupal company in Asia. Srijan specializes in building high-traffic websites and complex web applications in Drupal and has been serving clients across USA, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. Srijan is an Acquia Enterprise Partner.
Srijan Technologies

Sectors: 
Community