La Drupalera

We designed a system that integrates several services and platforms, which began to work together in a fully-coordinated way

PROCOMUN was an important technological challenge with a system architecture based on:

Drupal 7 as web platform and frontend of the whole system.

SOAP y Restfull API as "Enterprise BUS" based on J2EE technology.

Apache Solr as search platform.

A semantic platform based on Apache and Apache Jena Fuseki Stanbol for the improvement of the Solr data.

We developed and deployed at high availability a portal for the Government of Chile based on our Drupal Origins distribution, focussed on obtaining the best user experience from any device respecting the KIT digital of Chile.

An integral solution, which included both a web platform and a Facebook app

Drupal was clearly the best technical platform to develop the solution for this project, however we actually worked on all stages: Marketing strategy, UX, analysis, design and development of a new website, a new intranet for the social entrepreneur and a Facebook application for Telefonica Foundation.

We began the analysis to ensure the business objectives of the website were met. After that we developed, through the use of Drupal, a promotional and public website: a digital workspace for young entrepreneurs, a Facebook application and a control panel to evaluate and manage the ideas for the staff of the project Think Big.

Our work has included several studies to optimise acquisition and engagement, the development of a multilingual content manager and a multitude of integrations. Finally, the mobile website.

Drupalera performed the analysis, design and implementation of the new website, highlighting the following:

Consulting level: user experience design, implementation of KPIs in GAnalytics, re-architecture of information and SEO (strategy and technique).

Technical level: the biggest challenge was undoubtedly the migration of millions of records and multimedia material generated by the Tourism Agency by different agents: news, places, events, accommodation, etc. We also highlight the software architecture and site performance optimization with more than 500,000 visits per month. Finally, the integration of different information systems.

Using Drupal, we designed and developed the first online store for Unicef Spain and we helped to redefine and optimise its online sales model. We also redesigned and developed its corporate website to optimise the achievement of its objectives.

We performed an audit at System Architecture level, which included:

• Performance tests at hardware level (CPU, RAM, disk consumption - IOPS, iowait)
• Software performance tests (concurrence of requests to "MySQL", study of Slow Queries, use of the cache of MySQL, concurrence in Varnish, concurrence in Apache).
• Study of sessions
• Recommendation to use shared storage
• Analysis of processes and services which were not being used.

We provided recommendations for the configuration of the different services they used:

• Varnish: we analysed the URLs to be cached and proposed a list of new URLs that could be cached without any problem
• Apache: It was badly configured which only allowed only 15 requests per node. 
• Redis: We gave some guidelines in order to improve its performance.
• MySQL: We provided a more suitable configuration for its current use, working on caches and slow queries.

We performed an audit at Drupal Development level:

• Recommendation of a development flow based on GitFlow and with continuous integration to avoid large misalignments between development, preproduction and production environments.
• Control of the drupal_http_request function for requests to external subsystems
• Security breaches
• Incorrect permissions on important Drupal files. 
• Updating of modules, with priority given to security updates.
• Coding errors

A satisfied client and committed users are the best reward

Among the many results which we obtained from this project, the most important for us is, the satisfaction of the client. However, helping this project for young entrepeneurs and social innovation to improve its impact on society makes us feel more than satisfied:

1 million young people successfully supported and inspired to launch community projects, engage in social action, develop digital skills and gain the self-confidence necessary to get ahead in the job market. 

Maintenance costs were reduced by 30%.

Improved user experience and satisfaction.

Firstly, we carried out an analysis. Our objective was to learn about the current platform and its behaviour. We analysed:

Data transfer metrics

Database metrics

Diagrams

After learning about both the infrastructure and the different websites to migrate including the  deployment methodology, the next thing we took on was the creation of the new infrastructure in Amazon, where we adapted all its services to Drupal (both Drupal6 and Drupal7). AWS was chosen as a cloud infrastructure provider to ensure high availability and quality performance.

We used cache layers to lighten the load of web servers and database; high availability (redundancy of all services) to avoid possible system crashes; AWS self-scaling to horizontal growth; and CDN (Akamai in our case) to download all the multimedia content and their services.

Once the process of creating the infrastructure and migration of contents (source code, files, database, configuration files ...) was finished, we had to orchestrate the deployment and upload of new improvements to the different environments.

To achieve this, we created a new workflow, based on GitFlow and continuous integration: Git, Drush and Jenkins were the basic tools on which we relied.

Below we set out the different phases of the digital project.

Benchmarking

A comprehensive strategic analysis was conducted onto the social environments of Seville FC and its direct and indirect competitors and they were also put into perspective with market data from Facebook and Twitter and other segments of football audiences.

Design and Branded Content

With the aim of aligning ideas and strategies with the client's team and also unifying the graphic line of Sevilla FC towards the Digital Media, content workbooks and style guides were created and a Branded Content strategy was created. 

From Communication to Content Marketing

Starting from the analysis of the structure and typology of publications, the evolution of channels from mere Communication to Digital Marketing and Digital Content Marketing was established as a starting point for strategical improvement and standardization. Web Analytics, Content Curation and Inbound Marketing

SMO and SEO

In order to keep improving both the traffic acquisition strategies and audience growth objectives, an analysis and proposal for the writing of content focused on SEO and search engines marketing applicable to the social channels of the main search engine worldwide -Google + and Youtube- were made.