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Community contributions
As part of this project, we contributed to the Social Media Share module. We added Reddit share button to this module.
It’s been more than 140 years since Farm Journal, one of the leading business information and media companies serving the agricultural market, came into being. Today, it has a magnificent presence with a variety of brands reaching across the crop, livestock and produce industries and disseminating information that is up-to-date, precise and of the highest degree of excellence. Among its family of brands and organisations, one of the most influential web properties is AgWeb. It is the go-to online medium for the farmers to apprise themselves of the latest news on crop and livestock farming, live future trading data, weather forecasts, market assessment, ag policy and a lot more.
With such an extraordinary digital presence, AgWeb needed a robust solution to keep up with the changing landscape of web technologies and enhance its website. OpenSense Labs worked with AgWeb for revamping its digital presence. It involved a complete data migration of their old .Net based legacy website into the state-of-the-art CMS of Drupal and, in turn, retain the incredible search engine rankings that it has gathered over the years.
About the project
The main objective of the project was to improve brand identity and user engagement by rebuilding a traditional .NET website using Drupal 8. And, in the process, a plentitude of feature upgrades had to be done and make it easier for future development as well. (See below to check out the AgWeb homepage before the revamp).
Top-of-the-line web performance was needed to be attained. Keeping the website’s SEO intact and further boosting its SERP rankings was a top priority. Provision for easy content access was also a must-have. Moreover, WCAG compliance was required. (See below to check out the AgWeb homepage after the revamp).
To make it all possible, OpenSense Labs meticulously planned the project in sprint-based development cycles and applied Scrum process to successfully migrate content from the old .Net website to Drupal 8. A progressively decoupled Drupal approach was used for developing AgWeb and its subsites. Here, ReactJS manages the frontend and Drupal 8, as the content store, takes care of the backend. Search, crop comments and selective features were progressively decoupled.
Features like search and crop comments were built using progressively decoupled blocks. While Drupal 8 did a marvellous job at the backend as the content store, the on-site search was improved to a great extent with the help of React and Elasticsearch.
Drupal’s immense flexibility allowed easy integrations with Bynder (Digital Asset Management solution), Disqus (a comment system), Amazon S3 (object storage service), Google DoubleClick for Publishers (Ad management) among others.
Drupal 8 propelled the development of simple and clean website architecture. It had a modernised look and feel thereby resulting in increased user engagement. The revamped site gives much greater control to the publishers whilst distributing their content. Drupal’s quintessential support for performance optimisation measures has ensured that the page load time of the site is much lesser than the old setup. SEO enhancements have further accelerated the site’s Google rankings.
Why Drupal was chosen
Open source has gained a reputation over the years and is trusted by big and small media organisations alike. Drupal, an open-source platform, has been the top choice for the media and publishing companies for their digital presence. Going with Drupal 8 allowed AgWeb to tailor its media solution with the power of the open-source.
Key advantages of selecting Drupal 8 were:
- Streamlined management of different types of content like news reports, insightful blogs, or podcasts.
- Easy creation of listings with the assistance of Views.
- Room for integration with third-party services.
- Retention of high search engine rankings and further improving it.
- Support for integration of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for enabling creative and editorial workflows
- Multi-channel publishing and personalisation that allows you to serve the right content on the right channel at the right time.
- Enhancing speed, scale and stability.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Zurb Foundation: For implementing foundation framework that helped in creating a fully customisable and responsive grid
- Layout Builder: For building dynamic landing pages
- Foundation Layouts: For the integration of ZURB Foundation layout system with Drupal 8 Layout plugin
- Views: For creating listings of data on the website as blocks
- Metatag: For adding appropriate meta tags for all content types.
- Pathauto: For setting SEO friendly URL alias for multiple pages using patterns.
- Advanced CSS and JS Aggregation: To boost front end performance of the website.
- Bynder: For integration with Bynder DAM in order to provide seamless access to Bynder’s asset bank.
- Disqus: For integration with Disqus to increase user engagement via comment system.
- Migrate Tools: For migration of data from the old website.
