Dinesh Copoosamy » Drupal

Social River – Drupal Module

Dinesh — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:20:26 +0000

A life-stream module which aggregates feeds from a number of services and displays them in chronological order as a single stream.

http://drupal.org/project/social_river

South African History Online

Dinesh — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:13:35 +0000

South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-partisan people’s history project. It was established in June 2000 as a non-profit Section 21 organisation, aiming to address the biased way in which the history and cultural heritage of South Africans was represented in our educational and cultural institutions.

In 2010 SAHO decided to move from a static HTML site with approximately 15000+ pages to a CMS platform.

The case was made for Drupal and I began consulting on the SAHO New Site Migration and Construction Project.

Project Team: From left, Seelan Naidoo, Jonas Jiana, Tinashe Gunda, Joni Light, Kedibone Maakana, Dinesh Copoosamy. Insert: Mads Nørgaard, Omar Badsha (CEO)

The Migration Phase

We kicked off with analysing the existing content to allow us to architect the Content Types and Taxonomy structure that would best fit SAHO.

After a couple of workshops and a plan in hand we began the process of developing custom parsing scripts to extract and map the static html pages to the relevant Drupal Content Types and Fields. This process consisted of html purification of the existing pages, automatic addition of tags to assist with extracting fields and batch insertion into Drupal.

Eventually managing to successfully automate the migration of roughly 90% of the content (the bits that did not map perfectly were then manually fixed within Drupal).

User Interface, Look and Feel Phase

After analysing SAHO’s design transformation over the years coupled with lots of research on design trends of other sites within a similar space the user interface was decided on through a collaborative process undertaken by the project team and SAHO staff members.

Launch

The site launched successfully in May 2011 after months of hard work and involvement from the project team and the entire SAHO staff.

Since then the project focus was largely on SEO, user interface improvements, content tagging and server infrastructure to handle the increasing traffic to the site.

At the end of 2011 we kicked off a very exciting second stage of this project with an outlook to syndication, user interaction and a host of other cool features.

Recent Milestones

Traffic has grown steadily from roughly 50k visits a month (April 2010) to 160k+ a month (Feb 2012) with over 350K pageviews and this continues to grow.
The site has a 100% Insight score and a 63% SEO Grading from the Acquia network.
Stable mercury/pantheon stack, varnish at the front and ApacheSolr handling search (Drupals native search mechanism died after breaching 3million rows in the search index)