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.Zyxware Technologies developed the Sardar Patel portal in partnership with NVLI (National Virtual Library of India) and IITB (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay). The NVLI entity has been developed by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, under the National Mission on Libraries (NML) undertaking.
The aim of NVLI is to put together a digital collage of information of the entire Indian cultural heritage in the digital web world. Their main goal is to create, collect encode and collate various digital assets related to Indian history, in the form of a portal, and to allow relevant information access through web-based search.
The Sardar Patel website is a comprehensive study in the life of Sardar Vallabhbhaai Patel, a key figure in the Indian freedom struggle from the British. Built on Drupal 8, the website has the ability to translate to different languages. It showcases information about Sardar Patel collected from various libraries. A timeline in the site along with interesting tidbits, quotes and a quiz tells us about the man popularly known as the ‘Iron Man of India.’ The digital assets of over 2000 content records can be viewed based on the theme or main events in his life.
The aim of the site was
- To allow easy access to digital information present in the form of books, texts, videos, audios, and similar content in multiple languages.
- Collecting, combining, and standardizing all available digital assets in an easily searchable form.
- Educating people to use the NVLI portal and enabling them to contribute by submitting corresponding digital content .
- Ensuring preservation of history through digital content for the future generation.
Why Drupal was chosen:
In order to consolidate all the soft data available about Sardar under one centralized domain, the content had to be migrated from different sources. The Drupal platform enabled this along with a mobile–first user experience that reflects the evolving pace of innovation. The combination of tools that promote flexibility, ability to translate to multiple languages, centralized CMS and editor independence also aided the choice of Drupal for this web space on Indian history.
Other needs that were met with this choice include:
- Ease of use for non-technical content administrators
- Cost effective
- Secure and Scalable
In addition, the decision was influenced by the wide and growing government domain acceptance of Drupal. Drupal being FOSS, the site is not tied down to any proprietary CMS and thus ensures preservation of the digital content for the future generation.
The goal of the project was to build a scalable platform on the content management capability of Drupal by migrating the 2000+ content to Drupal.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Responsive Theme
The site is custom designed and built from scratch taking into consideration the requirement specifications of the client. The site being in Drupal 8 is by default responsive while being user friendly.
Content Migration
A key part of the project was migrating the 1 TB of data i.e over 2000 content files which included 1000 images, 800 textual content, several audio and video recordings to be added as content for the site while keeping the site workflow simple and easy to navigate. We were able to import content in bulk easing the migration process. This proved to be a real timesaver.
Digital Asset Management
To provide users with easily accessible information, the content on the site is sorted and arranged by the main events or themes as well as the chronological order of events based on the timeline of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
Custom Search
The quintessential search capability of the site helps search the site for a given topic or name. It is also possible to narrow down the search options through filters using the faceted search.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The list above shows some of the Drupal 8 modules that were needed to support the platform. Entities and fields allowed for more flexibility. The translation management helped in the multilingual translation of the site to the Indian languages.
Community contributions:
We have also released a distribution named Biolog with all features implemented in the portal, that can be used to built biography portals easily. https://www.drupal.org/project/biolog
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Government
