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Migrating
Weather.com
By: James Rutherford
3/12/15
James
RutherfordDirector of Client
Services@jamesrutherford
Design/Theming
● Usability Testing
● Responsive Design
● Drupal Theming
● Annotated
Wireframes
@Mediacurrent
Development
● Drupal Support
● Custom Module Development
● Large Scale Systems
Integration
● Security & Performance
Expertise
We help organizations build highly impactful, elegantly
designed Drupal websites that achieve the strategic results you
need.
Digital Strategy
● Content Strategy
● Content Generation
● Result Metrics
● Marketing Automation
Integration
● Who is The Weather Channel?
● Why Drupal is the right choice.
● Review of what we've done.
● Demo / Code Dive
● Q/A
@Mediacurrent
Agenda
Jason SmithSolutions Architect
@drupaljason
The Weather Channel● Serving approximately 50M page views per day.
● Approximately 30M unique visitors/month*
● During Hurricane Sandy, traffic peaked at 1B
requests/week with almost 300M in a single day.
● Unique forecasts to over 2.9M locations
● Massive library of dynamically generated weather maps
and story imagery
● Approximately 60M unique pages in sitemap
● Dedicated content entry team creating articles 24 hours a
day.
● Archive of 17k articles reused across multiple verticals
(TV, Wunderground, Mobile apps, weather.com, feeds,
etc)
@Mediacurrent
Challenges To
Address.● Simplify integration of (and transition from) legacy
platforms
● Simplify content entry, classification and
management
● Too many hurdles to content generation under
current platform - "14 clicks to publish"
● Cache management is a challenge
● Decrease time to market for new products
@Mediacurrent
In The Beginning● Spent nearly five months evaluating vendors and
platforms.
● Developed an internal scorecard to objectively
compare options.
● Worked with Mediacurrent and Acquia to develop
a plan for proof of concept over a series of
discovery meetings.
● Mediacurrent produced proof of concept site to
demonstrate capabilities of the team, model, and
platform.
@Mediacurrent
Pilot Project● 5 months from discovery to deployment.
● Able to accommodate shifting needs.
● Pilot project called an internal success.
● Used as publishing system for TWC during full site
development.
@Mediacurrent
Fitting All The Criteria● TWC has a long history of embracing Open
Source products
○ Supporting our being here, contrib,
engagement
● Positive outcomes of PoC with local vendor
● Evaluated Drupal within that context via objective
scorecard on metrics such as
○ Feature velocity
○ Scalability
○ Maintainability
○ Ease of use@Mediacurrent
What are the business
benefits?● Drupal leverages industry standard technology
and integrates with most caching platforms
lending it well to scaling in the cloud.
● CMS is adapted easily to support a superior
caching model, leading to fewer servers.
● More robust API and flexible platform means
simpler prototyping and release of new features.
@Mediacurrent
Starting The Migration● Conducted a discovery "deep dive" of all the
moving parts for the new initiative.
● Developed a "discovery" document, which
provided insight to the architecture and timeline.
● Close and regular communication with team both
on-site and remotely.
● Assigned project manager and lead architect who
work together to oversee project success.
@Mediacurrent
Easy Wins● Ability to create and defined roles to match the business
objectives and separation of duties.
● CMS should employ the use of state of the art UI
design, including drag and drop functionality where
appropriate.
● Should be able to work with multiple windows at the
same time, so he tool is not limited to one active task at
a time.
● System should support notification of events (Warnings,
Messages, etc..) to all users in the system, according to
their role.
● The CMS should have internal and external (third-party)
support.
● Provide system-level dashboards that communicate
pertinent information to various users of the CMS.
● Provides appropriate user interface controls to minimize
errors on behalf of the user. (confirmations,
notifications, validation, error handling).@Mediacurrent
Drupal Solution● Roles and permissions address completely
● The move to a web CMS solution, and Drupal's built in
locking addressed.
● Drag and drop re-ordering and tagging out of box,
contrib extended to provide more user interface
enhancements.
● Drupal's built in messaging, rule based notifications that
filter on role, etc.
● Views and Panels allowed for the rapid creation of
custom administrative interfaces.
● Built in locking, beauty_tips, formapi_validation and
node_edit_protection
Our Process● Quasi Agile development with regular sprints.
● Feature development ordered by priority and
internal system dependencies at TWC.
● Iterative approach favored over lots of time spent
documenting functionality.
● Ability to pivot and adapt to changing needs was
key to success.
@Mediacurrent
Powerful Tools!● Panels
○ Brings layout and presentation control to architects.
● Views
○ Brings data aggregation/curation to architects.
● Theming
○ Allows independent parallel site development.
● Features
○ Manages configuration deployment and reuse.
● Drush
○ Command line provisioning, configuration and
@Mediacurrent
Simplify integration of (and transition from) legacy
platforms
@Mediacurrent
Simplify content entry, classification and
management● Content team was previously embedding XML fragments with a rudimentary UI
and little or no validation.
● We were able to replace their legacy interface with custom inline dynamic
interfaces that the TWC team could extend easily.
● We still use XML fragments, but the user will never see them.
@Mediacurrent
Simplify content entry, classification and
management
● Drupal allows users to upload full size
images as first class entities and
associate those images with other
content.
● Upon display, Drupal dynamically
resizes, compresses, and generates
the image in three different sizes (by
default) : thumbnail, display and large.
Additional sizes can be added as
needed for instant generation.
● For TWC's specific needs, we sliced
all image variants immediately upon
upload and pushed to NAS.
● Categorizing and tagging content is
base functionality in Drupal. We
extended it to provide the user
experience that TWC was looking for.
Page Building is a Challenge.● For many urls of the site, there exist multiple presentations that are
dependent on the type of visitor and the context of the visit
● Packaging and deployment of changes to those related pages should
be bundled
@Mediacurrent
Enter Panels!● Group related page layouts /
presentations.
● Simpler management of related
presentations.
● Better reuse of content.
@Mediacurrent
Enter Panels!● Able to select variants through context evaluation
@Mediacurrent
Presentation
Framework● Multiple independent development teams
● Rapid, simple front end development
● Flexible presentation (ESI/inline/angular)
● Single platform for delivering Wxnodes, ads, page
modules.
○ Can consume context
○ Are independently configurable
○ Can be configured for ESI/inline delivery on
the fly
Are presented as user friendly panel panes
@Mediacurrent
SEO/Metrics
Requirements
@Mediacurrent
● TWC requires novel URL
structure dependent upon
content tagging
● Meta tags should be "informed"
by the title and the tagging
● Metrics tagging needs to be a
balance of dynamic and curated
SEO/Metrics
Requirements● Drupal Contributed Modules
○ Pathauto
○ Metatag
○ Tokens
● Deliver navigation elements as part of the base page or
ESI.
● Reviewed and discarded Phantom JS
@Mediacurrent
Change reception at
TWC?● Because we have streamlined multiple systems
into a single content entry system, the teams are
happier and more efficient.
● Have been able to retire multiple legacy systems.
● More stable platform with fewer support requests.
@Mediacurrent
Giving Back● Contributions made to open source.
○ Classy Panels Styles
○ Presentation Framework
○ Wxnode Platform
○ Patches to major Contrib Modules.
■ Storage Api
■ Metatags
■ Panels
@Mediacurrent
Thank You!Questions?
@Mediacurrent Mediacurrent.com
slideshare.net/mediacurrent
