Goldseek + Silverseek Website Redesign & Migration

Transcription

1 Goldseek + Silverseek Website Redesign & Migration

2 Goldseek + Silverseek Website Redesign & Migration Contents 1.0 Background P Project Overview P Modules P. 8 P.2

3 1.0 Background Section 1.1 Goldseek & Project Background In 2011 Appnovation Technologies was chosen by Goldseek to redesign, architect and migrate Goldseek.com and Silverseek.com into a single Drupal instance. The original sites were built on a custom coded CMS that had evolved over the years and was becoming too difficult to maintain as well as too complicated to integrate with the latest social media features. The Drupal CMS was chosen for its multisite capabilities, contributed community features and user management. Also, Drupal provides a good foundation for any new features and has a large community support constantly providing new modules and updates. The project itself was developed and hosted on the Acquia Managed Cloud service. Acquia referred Goldseek to their Enterprise Select partner Appnovation as they are a trusted and experienced Drupal development firm. Goldseek.com (founded in 1995) and Silverseek.com (founded in 2003) have provided gold and silver investors with the latest market news and information including live prices, charts, articles, in-depth commentaries, stock updates, analysis and the top daily gold and silver news stories from around the world handpicked by their team of editors. The sites also provide a growing platform of tools for their online silver community to connect and share information on gold and silver in a real time basis. P.3

4 2.0 Project Overview Section 2.1 Site Functionalities Goldseek Home Page The original Goldseek and Silverseek sites existed on a very rudimentary, custom coded content management system. It was mostly a manual process and there was no templating engine. Key business goals included: Providing transparency into the precious metals market and general economic climate Streamlining the accessibility of information and publish workflows Reducing the amount of article submissions that are sent to Goldseek.com via Optimize the overall performance of the site, especially during large spikes in traffic Higher user retention through: o o Attractive user experience Providing opportunities for users to engage with content authors and Goldseek.com in general Adding value for clients and advertisers Growing high quality content to become information partners with major players, such as the Wall Street Journal Increasing the subscriber base for authors and topics Building a user database with demographic information P.4

5 2.0 Project Overview Section 2.2 Custom Technologies Goldseek Market s Page Using the Aquia Managed Cloud for the development and hosting of this project was key as it provides the ideal environment for both Drupal sites and Drupal developers due to it having development best practices built right in. By using Acquia s Manage Cloud, Appnovation s team was able to save time by taking advantage of the following: Separate development, testing and production environments automatically deploy from GIT or SVN. Drag and drop interface that made it simple for developers to manage code, databases and files. An easy rollback for code or restore from auto backups. 24/7 support from Acquia to instantly troubleshoot issues with the Acquia support team. The Acquia Managed Cloud hosting is specifically pre-configured and tuned for Drupal performance giving sites high PHP memory allotment and LAMP stack tuning resulting in quicker rendering of dynamic content and improved site reliability. It has a load P.5

6 2.0 Project Overview Section 2.2 Goldseek Radio Page balancer configuration that determines the load on the server and, if needed, allocates more or less CPU memory or storage automatically with no user input needed. The Managed Cloud comes with: Varnish Reverse proxy caching system that speeds up the site by serving a cached page rather than processing each page request Memcache Memory caching system that stores Drupal s default cache tables into memory VS. the Database, which is faster and makes the site run faster Pressflow A version of Drupal that allows the site to use Varnish It also allows for multiple sites per server, with support for Drupal multi-site configurations that made it perfect for the Goldseek/Silverseek setup. Section 2.3 Mobile Site Design Appnovation reviewed analytics with the client about what areas of the site mobile users would make the most use of. Data indicated that users were using their mobile devices to get quick views of stock prices as opposed to the market news. With this in mind the mobile version was scaled back and focused primarily on the relaying of market data. P.6

7 2.0 Project Overview Section 2.3 Development Silverseek Mobile Site The mobile site for Silverseek.com is a subtheme based off of the main Goldseek.com theme, thus Appnovation was able to utilize all of the existing functionality and views from the main site. The mobile site is set up as block regions, so that the client can change the order around and try new configurations. User agent detection is used to serve up the mobile site, using the Mobile Tools module for Drupal 6. Section 2.4 Project Specifications Project Management This project utilized Active Collab, Google docs and Bugzilla Drupal Version 6.x due to stability and contributed module completeness Hosting Acquia Managed Cloud Hosting Advertising Advertisements are managed using OpenX ad publishing servers; Javascript snippets are pasted into the site s code P.7

8 2.0 Project Overview Section 2.4 Project Specifications Project Management Project management tools used for this project were Active Collab, Google docs and Bugzilla Drupal Version 6.x due to its level of stability and contributed module completeness Hosting Acquia Managed Cloud Hosting Advertising Advertisements are managed using OpenX ad publishing servers. Javascript snippets are simply pasted into the site s code for the advertisement to be displayed. P.8

9 3.0 Modules Section 3.1 Module Use Goldseek Newswire Major Contributed Modules Acquia Search To search using Acquia s slice CCK To create content types with fields Audio Field To output a flash element that allows a user to listen to radio shows Facebook Like Button FiveStar For content rating Google Analytics HomeBox To output the users configurable dashboard Imagecache To resize images Quickpost Bookmarklet Allows a bookmarklet to be created which saves external information to a node in Drupal Views To output views Workflow To implement a workflow around article creation/ submission WYSIWYG TinyMCE editor Custom Modules Goldseek Ads Works with Features and Blocks for custom advertisement placement and theming Goldseek Affiliate Used for Affiliate content type and all its related functionality P.9

10 3.0 Modules Section 3.1 Goldseek Article Used for the Article content type and all its related functionality such as workflow, auto publishing etc. Goldseek Central Allows Appnovation developers to leverage Drupal using scripts Goldseek Chart Handles the Charts that are stored on Chartseeker. com and pulls them into the site Goldseek Commentary Goldseek Radio Goldseek Search Integrates with Acquia Search adding another custom layer for site wide searchability Goldseek Service Link Handles the ability to share articles, commentaries etc Goldseek Site Wide Handles site wide functions such as Roles, Permissions, WYSIWIG etc Goldseek Textquotes Used for pulling text quotes from the Chartseeker.com site Goldseek User Handles user functionality such as Dashboard, Login Workflow etc. P.10

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