Chapter Three reinvented Military.com's publishing website, launching a fast, feature-rich Drupal 8 site. The site serves 32 million users, with 10 million logged in at any time. Following a massive content migration from Oracle Fatwire and seven separate websites, Chapter Three helped Military.com escape from its technical debt with a scalable, future-forward web platform.
Why Drupal was chosen
We chose Drupal 8 for it's robust built-in caching features and ability to integrate with many 3rd party services.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Simple AMP is an easy to use, easy to configure, custom module that saves time displaying Accelerated Mobile Page content.
Using cookies and JavaScript, we customized the Acquia Lift module which allows editors to place personalize content on pages. On Military.com, Army users see Army homepage content, while Navy users see Navy homepage content. We used JavaScript with this integration to leverage Varnish for performance.
The Acquia Purge module lets Drupal clear the Varnish cache as soon as content is updated. We handle new content with JavaScript so all pages are cached for quick loading and all new content is displayed immediately.
Using Cache Tags means when page content is updated, Drupal clears only the caches that use that content, instead of the entire page, keeping page load times down. We use a specific type of cookie to show anonymous pages to logged in users so pages load quickly for everyone.
