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By Brainsum on
Diginomica is a new type of media property designed to serve the interests of enterprise leaders in the digital era.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The first version of diginomica.com was launched in 2013 on WordPress. The site has been remade on Drupal 8 due to the WordPress' lack of adaptivity to a 21st century CMS and its needs. "I had seen how Drupal is getting into technologies that allow all manner of amazing things to come to life and that encouraged me to take a closer look." - said the co-founder of Diginomica.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Our scope was to remake a site in a more comprehensive and future-proof way learning from the mistakes made in the past. This way no major visual upgrades were made for the end-users, but the backend has its own improvements. During the migration from WP to D8 we made many structural changes including changes to the main navigation, reorganized the content and threw out the unnecessary features in order to achieve the best possible performance.
Since the platform is 3rd-party-heavy, we just as much needed to rely on the community as much to create custom modules. We provided a new Contextly integration, made several patches for Yoast and customized the Thunder admin theme. During the project, we learned the iframely, Algolia, AMP, Disqus and Parse.ly from inside out to achieve the desired goals.
As a result, we created a platform much faster than WordPress was with a clean backend and an editorial UI already way better than stock Drupal including workflow management for external editors.
Migration:
We migrated two Wordpress sites to a single Drupal 8.
3rd party integrations:
Contextly - a smart suggesting system based on the metadata of the content
Disqus - instant commenting solution
Algolia - the fastest search we've ever seen
iframely - the media provider for cca 2000 media types
Parse.ly - the better version of Google Analytics
Yoast - SEO optimization service
AMP - a custom responsive theme for Google's search result cache
Performance:
We leveraged Drupal 8’s cache tagging to optimize for Pantheon’s global CDN. Result: “Some @diginomica site stats for the nerds - now running 78% faster (close to Google speed), traffic up 15-16% consistently, bounce rate down 3.5%, thanks to @BrainsumCOM” - https://twitter.com/dahowlett/status/1126553143557394433
End result:
The best testimonial we ever had: https://diginomica.com/lessons-drupal-replatforming-project-our-own
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Personalisation plays a key role in diginomica's strategy. Contextly provides a simple way for machine learning powered content recommendations.
Algolia search is the fastest 3rd party search service we've ever seen, with instantly changingcontroversal result page upon altering the search keywords.
AMP is a controversial technology, but in this case as dignomica is not relying on classical advertisement AMP was treated as another channel how readers can find and access content the fastest way from their mobile search results.
The Thunder admin theme fixes some general UX issues faced with the default Drupal 8 editorial experience. As the editorial team used to work with Wordpress, we need to find the best admin theme and improve specific features. Thunder is a great drop-in replacement and a good foundation for building better editorial experiences with Drupal.
Community contributions:
We ported the Contextly integration module to Drupal 8 and will continue to develop and maintain it in a partnership with Contextly and diginomica.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Media
Publishing
Technology
