Online Obituary Creation Platform Implementation Including Timeline, Donation System & Background Music

Goals

This site is all about creating a memorial space for your loved ones who is no more with you. The client already had a website, which was running on drupal 7 but it had several problems. The site was extremely slow, and the design was very primitive. The client approached us to suggest improvements and was looking for our suggestion. Our team of experts inspected the site and found several issues with the way some of the features were implemented which was making the site slow. Needless to say, the client needed a complete redesigning as the site was not even responsive. We took up the challenge, and our designer came up with a very pleasing design. Also, there were several features which were not implemented using optimal techniques and made the site slow. We did a two week of discovery phase and made various recommendations.

Detailed Requirement

• Completely redesign the site, incorporating creative elements and responsive layouts.
• Implement a responsive theme based on bootstrap framework.
• Rehaul the memorial feature, as it was slow and non performant. Our studies earlier suggested that the memorial feature, which was at the heart of the website, was not implemented as it should have been.
• Implement a donation feature, incorporating stripe API.
• Implement a music gallery feature, where if selected, a memorial owner can upload songs, and once users visit the memorial or any of it’s sub pages, the playlist will keep playing in the background, and would continue across page loads. In other works, music play should be continuous across pages, and should not stop or pause as user navigates from one page to another.

Architectural Details

• Our team of creative designers came up with some excellent design ideas and client also provided his inputs for the process. We used mockup tools to discuss layouts and UI/UX at each stage, before final design was implemented.
• The theming was done as a bootstrap sub theme, and employs excellent usage of theming layer using process and preprocess functions.
• The memorial feature was rewritten completely using Organic Group and its helper modules. We found OG as the perfect choice for this project, as memorials needed to be groups, and there would be various other content types, like news, video, audio, gallery etc designated as group content. Also OG module gave us a pretty solid control on the permission system between memorials and contents, as some memorials were meant to be private as well.
• The music player was implemented as custom solution, a short js framework was written for it, and iframes were used to make sure the music continue to play across various page loads.
• Stripe Payment API was implemented and integrated. We refrained from using a full blown commerce system as this was only meant to be a lightweight donation feature that did not need other functionalities of an ecommerce platform.

Challenges

Major challenge on this project was rehauling the memorial feature. The memorial feature, which was the heart of this website, was not built in optimal way, and not using the best of what was available in drupal. We needed to make sure the feature rehaul, which we were doing would be the best possible solution, of course, but then, it had to take care of it’s interaction with other parts of the website, and needed to ensure our solution works well in cases where it co-functions with some other features on the site. But we pulled it off successfully, and in the end, the feature was not only very performant, but the bonus of doing things in proper way ensures that it can be easily extendible going forward.

Highlights

• Some brilliant UI/UX suggestion to client, after a detailed review of their present site and layout, which was not driving much traffic, because of poor design, misplaced elements etc.
• Redesign the website to give it a clear, modern and appealing look.
• Implement a bootstrap based theme, making proper use of process and preprocess functions, eliminating need to write logic, loops and other clumsy PHP code inside the template.
• Rehaul of a poorly written memorial feature, which was the heart of the site to a more appropriate OG based solution which takes care of access control and granular permission system.
• A sitewide music player per memorial, that would not stop playing the music from one page load to another, if memorial owner has chosen to play music in the background.
• Advanced payment gateway handling using Stripe API, giving a very flexible donation system.

Outcome

Looking at the redesigned site, client got excellent feedbacks during his beta testing phase. Also the theme implementation was really crisp, and the frontend was very fast and responsive. All the assets were properly handled and optimised. In terms of functionality, needless to say the OG usage was a game changer as it was totally perfect for this requirement. Client got extensive administrative controls, and when we explained him the scalability factor he was really impressed. At the end, the project turned out to be great, and it was an extremely successful association with the product and the client.