By Specbee on

IEEE is one of the world's largest technical professional organisations dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is a professional society of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) focused on several aspects of information: it's processing, transmission, storage, and usage.

Visit itsoc.org →
ITSOC Drupal website
Why Drupal was chosen: 

ITSoc's website was originally built on Plone and was getting difficult to maintain, evolve and incorporate new features. ITSoc determined that Drupal was the right CMS as they looked at rebuilding their public facing site. The new site would not only have forward looking features but also a refreshed look in keeping with the current market trends. Specbee was chosen to design and develop this site and also upgrade the site to Drupal 9.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The work involved:

  • Refreshed UI/UX design
  • Improved content creation abilities
  • Features that allowed for video upload, moderation and publishing. Ability to handle large amounts of video.
  • Integration with third party systems
  • Migration of content from Plone to Drupal
  • Implementation of secure, stable and streamlined deployment processes and hosting

The Challenges:

  • Implementation of a new design while following the IEEE brand guidelines.
  • Ability to create microsites having subtle differences in look and feel. The microsites have their own information architecture and authoring flows that are different from each other and the parent site.
  • Ability for members to create/update content easily while following a customized work flow.
  • Third party integrations to enable single sign-on.
  • Improved video search and faceted listing capabilities.

Our Approach:

We looked at this as an all new site build. We worked together with the ITSOC team and iterated through the different steps of our design process and arrived at visual designs that were to be implemented. We then determined information architecture based on user journey inputs we obtained from ITSOC. The designs were broken down into components and components were developed such that they could be used to build pages. We used Drupal's Groups feature to achieve the required microsite functionalities. The powerful Search functionality was implemented using Elasticsearch.

For content migration from Plone: We obtained content in a CSV format and then imported this into Drupal. The site was extensively tested to ensure the content migration was performed accurately.

Client Speak

Specbee was consistently responsive to our requests, and built an on-budget site that met all of our specifications.

-- Brian Kurkoski, Chair of Online Committee, IEEE Information Theory Society

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Layout Builder
Search API
Redis
Workflow
Groups, Communities and Co (GCC)
Workbench Email
Easy Breadcrumb
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Layout Builder

For easy building and implementing of custom landing pages.

Redis

For faster and effective caching, we implemented the Redis module resulting in a high-performing site.

Workflows

Drupal workflows module allows various transitions between content. ITSOC wanted to publish certain content after review and did not want to give this permission to every role. Using workflow module, various states like draft, review, published & archive were introduced for the content and users with specific roles were granted permissions to review and publish the same.

Workbench Emails

Since content states were defined, we needed emails to be triggered when content moved from one state to another. Workbench emails module was used to provide admins options to define email transitions and also configure the email subject and the body.

Groups

A major functionality required by ITSOC was to have multiple microsites. Groups module was used to accomplish this. With the help of this module, we were able to group content (for microsites), users (with specific access to microsites) and also other entities which enabled us to create and manage microsites easily.

Easy Breadcrumb

This module was used to create configurable path based breadcrumbs. By using the URL and the title of the page, breadcrumbs were created and placed at the top of the page to enable easy navigation on the site.

Organizations involved: 
Specbee
Sectors: 
Non-profit