MicroAssist - from DotNetNuke to Drupal

Search Engine Optimization

Effective SEO starts from clean HTML code. We used Genesis base theme. This base theme provides:

• Clean and valid HTML out of the box
• Flexible layout elements and classes
• Optimized placement of content early in source code with navigation and block content following

We use several modules to enhance on-page SEO such as Page Title and Nodewords. The Page Title module allows us to define search engine-friendly page titles, while keeping the original title on the visible page.

In order to automate the management of meta keywords and descriptions, we use Nodewords integrated with another wonderful module, Token. This allows us to use a node teaser as a meta description and node tags as meta keywords.

In transferring the content from the old site to the new site, the Yahoo Terms module was a great time-saver. It extracted keywords from page content and put these as node tags, which later were used by Nodewords to add meta keywords.

And, of course, we use the famous Pathauto module to keep our URLs clean and readable.

Content Management

Drupal comes with a great UI for content management. Every content type in Drupal is a node that has the same UI for adding, changing, or removing content. You can leverage CCK module to build more sophisticated content types.

In order to keep site navigation consistent, we placed links to each node into the Primary Links menu. This allows us to have a site map using the Site Map module, a sub-menu block in the sidebar with help from the Menu Block module and a nice breadcrumb using the Menu Breadcrumb module.

The Views module is very helpful in organizing content by category. When content is posted, the module automatically displays it in the designated sections of the site, depending on the categories chosen by the author.

Several custom blocks on our site contain hand-coded HTML. In order to discern which blocks our less HTML-savvy editors could access and which they could not, we use the Block Access module. This module allows us to keep only the Title and Body fields editable for selected blocks.

With help from the Control Panel module we created a page for our site editors where they can quickly create new content, access a list of existing content, see all web form submissions, add/delete users and assign user permissions. This helps our editors focus on common tasks without being overwhelmed by the number of administrative pages in Drupal.

We also used the core Drupal Book module to create an onsite manual for our content editors. With help of SWFTools and Flowplayer we put together short tutorials and screen casts on how to manage the website.

New Feature Development and Security

Drupal provides great infrastructure for developing new code without changing existing code. The concepts of modules and hooks help a lot when you need to change behavior of some core component and at the same time avoids re-merging changes over and over again after each Drupal upgrade. We leveraged these features when building modules to integrate our legacy ColdFusion website.

Our custom module essentially acts as an HTTP proxy and is plugged in to menu via menu hook system. Custom titles and breadcrumbs were implemented via theming hooks. It is easy to customize the behavior of various core Drupal elements without needing to modify any of the Drupal source code. Now the content of the old website appears as an integral part of the new one.

To manage the updates for Drupal and our many third-party modules, we use Drush. Drush allows us to do a full site update with one command, drush up. Drush handles the downloading of the latest core and third-party module updates, backs up existing modules and executes all module database updates.

However, even with Drush managing our code, we NEVER do code changes on the production server – and we strongly advise against doing so. Instead, we use a Git repository. Each developer works on their own development machine – whether it is for development of new modules, changes to the theme or simple module updates using Drush.

After finishing and doing complete test, a developer commits all changes and pushes them to the main repository. After testing by other developers, all changes are pulled from main repository to the production website.

Use of Git version control system allows us to keep track of all changes and be able to revert to any revision if something goes wrong. Also, Git allows team members to work on the code together.

One important thing to note when using Git for deployment (as well as any other deployment method) - keep “settings.php” file separated between development and production environments. This is very easy with Git - just create “.gitignore” file in the root folder of your project and add “sites/default/settings.php” into it. This will instruct Git to not include settings files into repository. You may also choose to ignore the .htaccess file in your Git repository.

Scalability and Availability

Drupal provides quite a few performance features out of the box and more with third party modules. First of all we activate aggregation of CSS and JS files. Drupal has many CSS and JS files and our theme, for ease of development, separates styles and JavaScript between several files. Without aggregation each file would need to be requested from the web server and browsers usually can handle only 6 simultaneous requests. Aggregating all style sheet and JavaScript files gave us faster page open speed.

We use Memcached with the help of the Memcache module as well as Boost for caching pages for anonymous users. The boost module allows us to generate static pages from dynamic content and serve these static pages to anonymous users without even firing Drupal code! The difference in serving static content is tremendous - 100ms with static page cache vs. 500ms using Drupal's built-in database cache.

Our server infrastructure consists of two load balancers managed by heartbeat, two web servers running Apache/PHP/Memcache and a separate MySQL database server.

On the web servers we run APC byte code cache which allows PHP to compile code once and cache it in RAM.

Marketing

We added the Webform module to the new website. Our marketing team was thrilled with the ability to quickly build all kinds of forms.

While building all kinds of slide-shows on a customer’s website we developed a method for it. Basically, we create a new content type called “Slideshow”, remove the Body field and add an ImageField CCK field called “Slides”, with unlimited images.

We use a custom template for Slideshow node type (node-slideshow.tpl.php), where we integrate all required markup for the slide-show.

ImageField provides three text fields for each image - Title, Alternate Text and Description. We needed a fourth field for URL. We installed the ImageField Extended module to add a URL field to the description of the image.

Leveraging core node and CCK UI we have an easy way to add/remove/change slides anytime without touching the code base, or worrying about resizing images (this is done by another wonderful module - ImageCache).