Sector(s)
When you say “Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment (or MLSE)” you say “exceptional fan experiences”. The kind that entertain, engage and ultimately define the brand itself.
So, when this leading sports company in Canada approached us with their new fan site project, we just knew that:
- a major opportunity just hit us
- we were facing a huge challenge
Toronto FC's future fan site, TFC Insider, was viewed as an “ecosystem” of various types of exclusive content — pulled from various sources — expected to keep its consistency across multiple user devices.
One that would deliver unified, streamlined and rich user experiences to the soccer team's supporters.
About the project
Our client's main objective for their new Drupal website was to (have us) turn it into a fan site where the supporters would get access to exclusive content. Of various types:
- latest news about their team
- promotional materials
- short clips
- giveaways
- user-generated content
- exclusive fan contests meant to bring them closer to their favourite team
In short: Toronto FC's fan site was planned to deliver... lifelong memories in the form of various types of exclusive, fan-engagement content.
The goal was to build and to grow the team's fan base by informing, entertaining and encouraging supporters to interact with the website and with its various “satellite” apps.
Furthermore, some of the client's specific requirements and expectations have been that:
- the website should support multiple user devices and that the delivered content should keep its consistency and flexibility across them all
- the future fan site should easily (and seamlessly) integrate with other third-party apps enabling smooth (third party) authentication and pulling fresh, relevant user content from various sources
Special Technical Requirements
To implement a media-rich platform for all logged-in supporters.
How? By integrating the fan site with Vimeo platform services and enabling it to feed video content straight from the sources, via API.
A type of communication that would pull and structure the videos thus retrieved from the platform.
Moreover, the resulting fan site integrates with the Janrain CIAM platform. One that leverages a unique, common user database used by a wide range of MLSE services and applications.
And so, it goes without saying that this integration enables cross-app user account sign-in and administration.
Finally, there are 2 major reasons why we've integrated it with Janrain API:
- to exchange user data and validate sessions
- to integrate token sign-in validation with those specific mobile apps serving the same purpose
Why Drupal was chosen
The project involved building the fan site, from the ground up, on the Drupal 7 platform.
The plan was to put together a custom pre-built architecture, with all the needed components, that would then scale up to accommodate all future traffic growth and content workloads.
General reasons for choosing Drupal:
- robustness as a CMS
- easy integration with third-party sites, apps, and services
- convenient extensibility of custom and advanced features (a powerful feature when dealing with a user-oriented website)
- user service
- granular access to content, to certain areas on the website (Drupal's flexible system of user roles and permissions)
- easy configuration of dynamic pages via an extended web admin UI
Project-specific reasons for using Drupal:
- fast MVP development
- easy integration with our custom Agile development process
- rapid component development
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Because they enabled:
- configuration updates
- new components integration (such as new content types)
- a fast development process
- module extension
And here, we feel like putting the Features module into the spotlight, since it played a major role in simplifying:
- the whole development process
- the deployment of code and data expansion packs
In short, we used these particular Drupal modules mainly because:
- they fit our agile approach to the development process
- they enabled a smooth integration with all those 3rd party services that were later added to the project
Tools That We Used:
- PHPStorm for IDEs
- Slack as our main communication channel
- Jira for managing our project tasks and sprints
- Confluence for documenting the implemented features, guides and other resources such as: media, diagrams, deployment and test scenarios
