Sector(s)
This fan community website shifted to a new level of performance with a fully reconfigured user system and integrated, dedicated video section.
Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE), based in Toronto, Canada, owns the Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey team, and was looking to create their own new high-performance fan site: Leafs Nation. The site required leveraging Drupal’s user management capabilities and incorporating a section dedicated to Vimeo content.
And all this in the name of top performance!
About the project
Business challenge
“Best-in-class service experience for all fans” has been MLSE’s mission—which includes digital experiences. They needed overall high performance, and fast-loading video content.
Results
The user management system was completely reconfigured and the newly integrated video content section (Leafs Nation Network) optimized for performance via layered caching.
Business challenge story
Rich digital user experiences are delivered at high speed.
The Leafs Nation Network would serve Vimeo content (our client already had an account on Vimeo, where they managed the site's video content) available to be embedded, via Vimeo API, to specific domains only (so, we were talking about private video content).
Moreover, the Janrain platform (with its multiple API calls, for every single user login/signup/edit info and all those long Janrain call queues that were practically overcharging their IBM Bluemix hosting) was the main “culprit” for the delays in page load time.
And site performance had already been a sore point for our client and it was about to become the ultimate goal driving all our future decisions as well.
Transformation story
A new blazing fast fan community site incorporating a dedicated video section
The project's particular needs and implementation “traps” that we predicted (or not) called for a lot of custom code writing, custom-built modules, and a few contributed modules.
As previously mentioned, our client's fan community website was already running on Drupal 7 and they wanted to stick to Drupal.
They asked us to rebuild it, from scratch, implementing the newly needed functionalities and making all the requested improvements.
And it sure was a transformation path paved with… challenges.
First of all, we worked to implement our Drupal solution (where Drupal would take over the data collected on users’ signing up via Janrain to create new Drupal accounts) for reconfiguring the user system entirely.
Next, there was the Vimeo API rate limit (around 2,500 calls per hour) and we were talking here about content being pulled exclusively from Vimeo.com; content that had to load at top speed on the future Leafs Nation Network. And this limitation called for a layer of caching.
Our solution was that of caching both Vimeo albums and videos (the first ones individually, by their album_id, while the latter by their video_id, on the Drupal site). Once we resolved this issue, we applied the caching strategy on 2 other key sections of the fan site: “Gameday Coverage” and the “Fan Corner.”
These 2 specific sections are on a different cache expire value and they can both be adjusted right from the admin menu, by the site administrator. This way, we managed to achieve some sort of compromise between a relatively low cache expire value and the certitude that the API rate limit wouldn't be reached.
Results story
High overall performance, streamlined user management, integrated video content section
“Confronting” Drupal’s capabilities with the MLSE’s requirements of performance and new functionality implementation, we’ve managed to… somehow pull it off. We appreciate the trust that MLSE invested in us and its loyalty to Drupal.
The fruits of our labor range from the newly implemented Leafs Nation Network section, handling all things Vimeo-related, to the completely overhauled user system, to the newly added custom catching layers—a significant performance boost.
About MLSE
Based in Toronto, Canada, MLSE is one of the leading sports and entertainment organizations in North America. It owns, among other teams (digital channels and sports facilities), the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team.
And it stands out as the company constantly looking to deliver both its teams’ fans and the participants in the various events in its sports facilities (e.g Air Canada Center) the best physical and digital experiences.
Find out more about us
OPTASY is a full-service software provider. We started out small (in 2005) as a Drupal solutions provider and we’ve grown into the full-fledged Drupal and web development company that we are today. One with a “weakness” for full-cycle web projects.
In other words: if it’s a project involving building your site/app from the ground up, delving in custom coding (in custom modules building) in order to implement precisely that functionality that you need, and crafting that interface that should wow and engages your customers, we’re here to listen to what you have in mind!
Get a quote for free for your next project.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen to “back up” all the Janrain-based user management processes. And adding multiple layers of caching has been the accepted solution for addressing low-performance issues.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
The project's particular needs and implementation “traps” that we predicted (or not) called for a whole lot of custom code writing, lots of custom modules and a few contributed modules, as well. And here's the reasoning behind the usage of some of the key Drupal modules for this project:
- Features: it streamlined all the configuration data importing/exporting
- Paragraphs: it turns content creation into a flexible and easy process and maintains an ideal level of consistency across the website
- Profile 2: it helped us, once we properly configured it, to add new fields to the registered users' profiles
