Sector(s)
About the Allard Prize for International Integrity
The Allard Prize for International Integrity holds the reputation of being one of the world's most prestigious awards in the human rights field.
It recognizes and honours individuals and organizations for their anti-corruption efforts, for exposing cases of human rights violations.
In this respect, we can't skip mentioning the Allard Prize Photography Competition, as well.
One that puts the spotlight on the work of those photographers who document human rights issues. Whose photos depict individuals taking leadership in combating corruption in various parts of the globe...
Now, you can just imagine the overwhelming honour - that soon turned into huge responsibility - that we felt when the client chose us to handle their Drupal project.
About the project
Main Goals
The key objective of this project was to improve the website's overall performance.
And this got the OPTASY team working on a wide variety of tasks, ranging from:
- updating the existing website to the latest version of Drupal 7
- to run all the security and performance updates that such an upgrade process required
- to running a Drupal performance audit on the existing website, identifying issues and implementing additional speed and reliability improvements
Project-Specific Requirements
A special request from our client was to integrate a new translation system. One that would improve the user experience for all visitors accessing the Allard Prize website, irrespective of their geographical location.
Another project-specific requirement, that turned out to be quite a dare, was to migrate May-November 2019 content for the Photography Competition section of the website.
Why was this a complex challenge? Because that particular content had deep references throughout the website's structure.
OPTASY's Solutions
After evaluating multiple options, our team opted for GTranslate as the solution for our client's special request.
Why GTranslate? For 3 strong reasons:
- high performance
- lower costs
- great support
As for the content migration challenges, we've managed to come up with reasonable solutions for processing that data within the given Pantheon hosting plan.
Why Drupal was chosen
The Allard Prize website was already running on Drupal (Drupal 7), so the client was familiar and satisfied with the platform's capabilities.
“Why the latest version of... Drupal 7?” would be a more suitable question instead.
Because the client wanted to give allardprize.org a performance boost.
Therefore, the upgrade process included updating:
- the core Drupal modules
- the custom modules
- existing features
- part of the user interface
… and doing some performance optimization work, as well.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
GTranslate is the Drupal contributed module that we've chosen for implementing the requested translation functionality.
Why precisely this module? For many reasons:
- it uses Google “power” to translate text on Drupal websites
- it ships with no less than 103 available languages; our client can use this functionality to its full potential at any time
- it translates any HTML website and turns it into a multilingual one
Robust, feature-rich, versatile ... GTranslation checked off all the points on our long list of requirements.
The Results
First of all, we applied all the updates to the core, contributed and custom modules, along with all the latest security patches. In short: the Allard Prize website now runs on the latest version of Drupal 7.
Secondly, we enabled the GTranslate module and thus “injected” a fast and accurate translation feature into the website.
Last, but definitely not least: the overall performance on allardprize.org has improved significantly.
