Amazee - Drupal powered social collaboration. A redesign case study.

On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

Overview of Amazee features

Amazee provides you with effective tools to promote your project and collaborate with project buddies. You can for example decide upon the degree of openness and publicity of the project, assign different member rights and keep your visitors informed through an easy editable project magazine. The project team can exchange ideas in the discussion section and jointly edit text in the project's writeboard area. Members can upload pictures as well as other files and organize events and to dos in a calendar. Project funding is an important and unique part of Amazee, providing three built-in mechanisms for projects to raise money and ask for further support.

Development team and Amazee’s partners

Amazee is developing the platform in cooperation with its technology partners epoint in Romania and netnode in Switzerland (see profiles at the end of the case study). Epoint and netnode both have a broad experience in the development of Web 2.0 applications in general and special knowledge in the coding of PHP and in Drupal. Space Invader from Switzerland is responsible for the design.

Development setup

In the beginning working out of 3 different cities was quite new to all of us. Many of the developers have been on big projects before, but being separated by a couple of hundred kilometers definitely was a challenge.

Having development teams in Zurich and Lucerne, Switzerland and in Timisoara, Romania, we not only had to learn to use SVN the right way and communicate with each other but we also had to experience that web design and principles like an online styleguide are crucial elements for a successful development.

Today everybody commits their code to the SVN repository in Romania where the test system resides. Prior to this step every developer uses his own environment on his local machine where first tests are being done.

After successful tests we deploy to the live environment. Here we also improved our process quite a bit: Deployments starting at 10pm and ending at 3am were optimized so the minimum downtime for a big deployment was around 18 minutes in the end.

Process of the redesign implementation

Amazee’s biggest challenge was the implementation of the current design. Coming from a not web-optimized design that was implemented beginning of 2008 we started the process of redesigning screens and functionality in July 2008. By the end of July the first functionality for the redesign was implemented and templating started.

During August until mid of September around 90% of the old functionality was transferred or refactored to the new design.

[…] We did not completely follow the procedure Drupal suggests, which is to make functionality first and after that the design [install modules, then theme and design afterwards]. Because of the given time limitations we had to work parallel – with a changing and work in progress styleguide.
We started off by defining the basic styles, which are used all over the platform. We realized that most of the pages are different and we had to add more and more styles for those pages over the time.
Web publishers and the programmers were not very happy with each other. In the end we managed to get it up and running, even if there were lots of changes during the entire process. Therefore we cannot really say we had a predefined redesign process.

On September 16th the old Amazee.com was history. We deployed the whole new application within a couple of hours and opened up the new site to the public on September 17th.

Standard Drupal modules

Amazee is based on Drupal 5.7 and currently uses around 50 modules either from the Drupal core or community contributed. Additionally there are about 10 custom made modules. We plan to release some of them in the future back to the community.

Node API & Content Construction Kit (CCK) + Form API:

We used the content construction kit in several modules all over Amazee. CCK together with Node API makes Drupal a very flexible and enhanceable web framework. Why? The Node API is a great interface for a node (any type of content). You can easily create new content node types with CCK. The forms and Node API gives you functionality to create, update, and delete a node out of the box. You don’t need to care about details.

Aggregator:

As the title aggregator says – it aggregates RSS feeds from various sources. We used the aggregator to parse feeds that are attached by the Amazee users in the project magazine. Aggregator is compatible with the various RSS versions as well as Atom. Therefore we didn’t need to care about compatibility.

Tagadelic:

This module is used in several places on Amazee.
First, each project and alliance can be tagged according to the users needs. Users can tag their personal profiles as well.
A special use of the Tagadelic module is made within projects and alliances itself. There the project tags are displayed in the size according to other tags used on the Amazee platform.
This gives the visitor an overview how often the tags on the current project are used platform wide.

Privatemsg:

Private messages are one of the key elements on Amazee. They are on the one hand used for the communication between the users itself. On the other hand they are also used for notifications on events happening on Amazee so the users stay up to date on changes in their projects.

Imagecache:

Amazee uses several image sizes to display user profile images and project images. Users are free to upload any size of image and the image cache is used to scale images to the respective size.

Invite:

The invite module is a great community tool that is flexible, easy to use and extend. Within Amazee it is a core requirement and asset for every project. It helps the projects to grow and from the user point of view helps to share and promote the projects.

Modified Drupal modules

As modifying modules is not the best idea we prefer to maintain ‘custom’ code and ‘framework’ code. Nevertheless some enhancements were necessary to get to the required functionality. If someone from the community is interested our developers can help and explain more in detail how and what changes have been done to the modules. We will most likely not release official patches since the modifications are very Amazee specific.

Imagecache:

A page on Amazee can have lots of images and the image cache module delivers all images from Drupal. We changed the module to escape the PHP processing when delivering and get the images directly from the cache location.

Invite:

The invite module was enhanced so any Amazee user can now invite his friends by email to join a project in case they are not Amazee members yet.

Custom Drupal modules

Project/alliance:

Projects are the central part and asset of the Amazee community. Therefore the project module is an important piece that brings together lots of pieces: other modules like the magazine, discussion, writeboard, members, polls, and to dos are aggregated by it.

The project module is a content module that improves the node features of Drupal.
On the other hand the alliance module brings projects together. It is a content module that combines and aggregates other project nodes as well as their members.

Both modules make use and are supported by other community modules like Invite, Privatemsg, Imagecache, CCK, and so on.

Project magazine:

The project magazine is a mix of various libraries. The Yahoo-JavaScript-Library allows us to make the drag and drop features that can be seen in the ‘Configure magazine’ mode. The ‘project magazine framework’ allows us to rapidly implement new widgets. The blog and text/video widget for example is purely based on CCK hooking into the project magazine. The RSS feed module is based on the aggregator hooking into the project magazine.
Adding new project magazine widgets reduces the development in handling the business logic accessing on CCK nodes or custom tables.

Webwidget:

To help Amazee users spread the word about themselves and their projects we created a module that takes content from Drupal and creates little JavaScript badges that can be integrated in blogs and websites. The badges are dynamic so if there are changes in the content on Amazee the badge is automatically updated as well.

Why we love/dislike Drupal

We love Drupal mainly because of CCK and the hook system. It allows us to develop agile and rapid. But also Drupal core functionality like the menu system, included jQuery, themeing and custom module integration are ace! And, we dare say that api.drupal.org is one of the best documentations out there... we really love it!

Communication between modules:

The connection and communication between modules using ‘hook’ functions and the use of ‘invoke’ so you get what you want and need in your modules is very powerful and easy to use. The node API hook and form_alter are best examples for this.

System module:

Its structure, the ease to extend and learn, and its accessibility are a good example of how things should be done in modern, state-of-the-art, and extensible frameworks.

But we also had to learn and experience some downsides in Drupal. One of Drupal’s weaknesses (at least in version 5.7) is the speed and performance in general. We wouldn't say that Drupal is slow. But when complexity grows, you really have to care about performance. However - with source and server tweaking you can get reasonable results.

Templating:

We also had some troubles during the templating. Currently templating and programming is done more or less in parallel. And since things change quite often (from an Amazee requirements point of view, not Drupal code base), templating is sometimes quite difficult. We think that the new Drupal 6 theme system would help us in making things a lot easier (from an agile development point of view).

Menu system:

Requirements sometimes change – so do menu structures change. But: ‘… how should a developer tell a client or project manager that a navigation item is nested and that he can't place it anywhere he just wants?’ ;-)

Closing remarks, profiles, and contacts

Amazee was quite a lot of work for all of us until today – and it will go on and we are not done yet. Besides that Amazee wants to say thank you to the Drupal community for such an outstanding product, to Space Invader our creative mind, to epoint and netnode and to everybody else who helped building Amazee.com as it is today. Please find profiles and contact information below.

Partner profiles

epoint consulting & development is a fresh and pleasant working environment, where relaxing, studying, working and having fun is part of the daily schedule as any project. Our versatile team consists of young, highly specialized professionals who work and create together. http://www.epoint.ro/

netnode IT services GmbH is a software engineering and internet marketing agency founded by Lukas Fischer. Our core competency is the development of web applications focused on communication and marketing. http://www.netnode.ch/

Contacts

For additional information feel free to contact:

• Markus Tressl, Head Technology Amazee
  markus.tressl[at]amazee.com, http://drupal.org/user/198055
• Adela Goaga, COO epoint
  adela.goaga[at]epoint.ro, http://drupal.org/user/375874
• Lukas Fischer, Founder netnode
  lukas.fischer[at]netnode.ch, http://drupal.org/user/204430