The beginning of 2011 brought two very interesting new developments to the MC tech team: a new exiting project for the world renowned photojournalism foundation World Press Photo and the release of Drupal 7, one of the leading open source content management systems. From the onset we were aware using a “fresh” new dot-release (as early as 6 months after launch) comes with many challenges, however, we decided to give it a go!
Why we chose Drupal 7 for World Press Photo
To start off we’ll explain why we went for Drupal 7 instead of Drupal 6 or another CMS system like for instance Joomla, Typo 3 or EZ-publish. While all previously mentioned CMS systems would have been suitable candidates we went for Drupal because of its advanced out of the box capabilities such as custom content types, taxonomy and the pretty much default installed Views module which when combined allows for the creation of highly customised sites. On top of that Drupal also has a very grown up user community and a huge user contributed code repository. Drupal also has an advanced theming system which allows the flexibility to skin pages on any level required and enables front-end developers to work with the modules that back-end developers have written.
The choice between Drupal 6 and 7 was partly made by the client who preferred to use a system that could be used for the next couple of years without the need for upgrading to a new version within that time. Other reasons for using Drupal 7 where the clean user interface, core and theming improvements.
Building a strong, visually appealing and multimedia heavy site using Drupal 7
Our information architects and designers layed out a very visually appealing design for visitors to experience the photos and understand the stories behind them. One of the main aspects of the concept was to give users a different browsing experience which would allow them to learn more about the photos, the photojournalists and the organisation. While traditional navigation is certainly present, users can navigate the site through contextual modules and the photos as well. This manner of navigation allows users to not think too much about structure, but more about what attracts their attention, what do I want to view or read about next, instead of what does the organisation show me next.
Putting World Press Photo in the driving seat
To be able to create this kind of flexibility we needed to create functionality within the Drupal 7 CMS system that allows the client to create contextual modules and let them place these throughout the entire site. Currently pretty much all pages contain placeholders where large, medium or small contextual modules can be selected to show up. Now this type of navigation only works when there is an healthy amount of interesting information available which is already the case with the contest, multimedia and Joop Swart Masterclass galleries, but World Press Photo was able to take it one step further by adding more contextual information to the site about the background of the contest, photographers and their stories. They are able to do this because of flexible content pages that they can create which consist of a text area as well as multiple placeholders for the contextual modules.
So much flexibility and control usually comes with a price no?
Giving this amount of flexibility to a client usually comes with a price. All content that is put in needs to be of high quality, be maintained and too much flexibility can sometimes break the site. The last item we have restricted as much as possible, the client can create pretty much everything using default Drupal 7 functionality but the first two potential issues cannot be enforced technically. Fortunately, World Press Photo has a dedicated content management team who are able to create and maintain quality content, see the proof on the new site!
How the contextual modules work
The way this system works is by using a combination of a custom content type in combination with several views and panels. The content type is added to relevant content types (e.g. pages, photos, etc.) via a node reference and allows for storage of text, images and multimedia while the view takes the NID as context and then fetches the content type using a relation that matches on the node reference field name. This view is then places in a panel pane for display. Of course these fields are only outputted when there are modules found connected to the current NID. In some cases multiple views need to be made when multiple module placeholders exist on the same page.
The last missing link are the Drupal .tpl.php templates which we use to enforce a certain output (small, medium, large but also call to action, image, multimedia, etc). For each version and size its layout is determined using these templates.
Additional complexities
Driving Drupal 7 has been a great deal of fun, but of course a project is not complete unless there are some complexities to work with.
The early state of development of the new Drupal 7 release
When we chose to go with the latest and greatest version of Drupal 7 we assumed that 6 months lead-time would be sufficient for the most important modules to get a stable Drupal 7 release out. Besides that 6 months is a pretty long time, they all had pledged to be ready for Drupal 7 when it came out. Unfortunately the reality was quite different which made clear that all those pledges (“#D7CX: I pledge that [module name] will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released”) were worth absolutely nothing! Still today – 7 months later – many modules have no stable Drupal 7 release, so lesson learned for module builders (I hope), don’t pledge what you cannot deliver.
Drupal 7 Excel data migration
World Press Photo has got thousands of images and multimedia files. For this release we had to incorporate all relevant files for the 2011 contest which are still a couple of hundred photos and multimedia files as well as the same amount of contextual information. Because of the amount of content we decided to use the Drupal 7 Migrate module. Our input format was Microsoft Excel which by default is not supported so we needed to build this in ourselves. While doing this we noticed that the module is very advanced on importing from an existing database but less advanced and documented on importing from CSV or XML. Both formats would have been a great starting point to use for the Excel version. While this did add some additional development time to the project, we got it to work sufficiently enough for our needs and in the end this did save the client many hours of content input. Thanks for such a great module guys, if you want to work with us to get the Excel reader into the modules core (or extras module ) just drop us a line.
Multiple technical teams working on the same site
For the realisation of this website MediaCatalyst partnered with Belgium based ONE agency for most of the technical implementation while MediaCatalyst was in the technical lead of the project. In addition to that we also worked with Revolt, a company who has built a very advanced multimedia production tool and also delivered the front-end player for this to World Press Photo which was then integrated into the site. Both very professional and pleasant partners but of course when three parties work on the same site this does need to be managed which can take up quite some time for the tech lead.
Client Drupal 7 experiences?
World Press Photo are very happy with Drupal 7 and its advanced capabilities which allowed us to create such an advanced website with all the options that they desired. They also appreciate the clean user-interface which they could easily use without any prior instructions, something that was certainly not the case with their prior CMS (Mambo). The only downside at the moment is that there is no search interface in the admin interface to find content easier (they need to mange hundreds of content items which will grow out soon to thousands) as well as that it is not possible to select which fields to show in the content overview page (they prefer to show a system name instead of the title). Both missing items can be added with custom development and or modules, but it is functionality that would make any content editor’s life much easier and really should be there by default.
Your Drupal 7 experiences?
So what are your (or your clients) experiences with Drupal 7, let us know your findings about Drupal and or this article!
Pingback: | World Press Photo and MediaCatalyst, a strategic partnership since 2004 | AMP | MediaCatalyst blog