From Tweentribune.com
“Tweentribune is a a daily news site for tweens. Each day news links are posted to the day's most compelling news from a tweens perspective. Stories chosen for TweenTribune are selected by tweens working closely with professional journalists. Tweens can submit links to stories they'd like to share, submit their own stories and photos, and comment on the stories they read. Alan Jacobson is TweenTribune's managing editor.”
INTRODUCTION
President of BrassTacksDesign, Alan Jacobson contacted us on December 24th 2008 to add 2 main functionalities on the portal Tweentribune.com which used to run on Wordpress initially but he wanted to move to more capable content management system Drupal. We ported the two main features on Drupal 6 system which were
1) Moderate all their student's comments from a single-page UI
2) When a student adds comment to a node, the node is assigned an additional taxonomy term which includes the student's cityName + schoolName + teacherName
After we completed these features, Alan got impressed with our quality of work and extensive knowledge in Dtupal to accomplish the features in required time frame.
This gave us the opportunity to have an ongoing development relationship which involved Drupal module development, theming tweaks and maintenance of Tweentribune.com. Ebizon Netinfo wrote the code for all the custom features of TweenTribune. This custom code is integrated into a Drupal Content Management System in the form of Drupal Modules. After 1.3 years, Tweentribune is a success story that has been featured in LAtimes, YPulse.com, KillerStartups.com, WeMedia, GoodHouseKeeping.com and getting almost 2 million page views a month. Currently, Ebizon also provides ongoing support and 24/7/365 technical support which can be referred here: http://tweentribune.com/content/Partners
.
CHALLENGE
Some of the challenges that Ebizon team faced were :-
1) Drupal is both resource intensive and database intensive. Its strength is ease of development, extensibility through modules and faster development time. Its downside is that it requires more CPU and RAM than other CMSs.
2) Busted Page issue which was causing page to break. The busted page was a much trickier issue solely due to its intermittent nature.
3) To provide 4-8 hours turnaround time service to help users have seamless experience
4) Using Memcache, Squid, APC, etc to make Drupal scale
5) Location based advertisement and headers implementation in Drupal 6.
6) As the success grew there were many request from teacher start were coming daily from Contact form for quick registrations.
7) Only teachers of a classroom should be able to moderate the comments and comment should be published only after they have been approved.
8) Displaying username, password and submit in one line to optimize the space.
9) Blocking inappropriate words that student puts in their comments
10) Every Student does not have an email id therefore one of the challenges were to allow users to register without entering email id. Drupal registration has a compulsion of adding an email address through which it verifies the user.
11) Alan needed a way for the teacher to send every student’s comments to the printer with one click, instead of sending them one at a time with one click per student.
12) Lighttpd is a web server that was used to serve static files (images, javascripts, css) to reduce burden on Apache webserver. This was running on port other than 80- which was blocked by Schools firewalls.
SOLUTION
Ebizon NetInfo utilized extensible open source CMS (Content Management System) called Drupal to develop Tweentribune. Drupal is an appealing solution because it allowed Tweentribune.com sufficiency they needed to administer the new website. Drupal is known for its flexibility. We utilized over 20 modules and developed couple of custom modules to capture the desired functionality and features. The more prominent modules included Automatic Nodetitle, CCK, Image Field, Image Cache, Image API, Avatar Selection, Block, , Captcha, Comment, Content Template, DHTML Menus, User Login Bar, Memcache Admin, Node family, Users, Taxonomy, Upload, Views, Web Form, Performance Logging, Date Time, Image,etc.
Ebizon provided a solution where tweens can discuss the news daily and teachers can moderate the comments for each classroom.
With the help of Rackspace, Alan’s commitment and Ebizon team’s Drupal expertise, team was able to scale the site and overcome all performance hindrances.
1) With our experience we found that couple of Drupal contributed modules are resource intensive and their optimization is necessary in order to scale the system. Some of these modules were We monitored SQL queries using devel module and identified the queried that consumed most resources. Then we optimized those queries and monitored their performance and load on the system for couple of days. The results and improvements were captured in a performance report that was published for client’s review.
2) The Busted Page Issue was THE MOST important issue since the site had scaled to 2 million page views a month and we couldn’t risk this problem to survive any longer. Initial attempt was to disable BOOST module but to our surprise disabling Boost did not solve the problem. After 24 hours of rigours effort and monitoring it looked like menu paths were restructuring during CRON that was running every hour. The best of teams in the world were thinking on it but no one could get to the root. Finally, one of our best technical leads made the cron to run instead of every hour only at night at 12 am. This resolved the Busted page problem and was a GREAT success for us and Alan.
3) To support Tweentribune requests, we used Basecamp (project management tool) and for every Urgent request, turnaround time of 4 hours was provided. To ensure seamless experience, our technical lead and project manager’s direct contact numbers were provided to ensure proper communication
4) Memcache, APC and Squid were installed and configured on the server. Memcache was monitored and configuration of Memcache was changed with time as traffic improved and RAM of the server was changed.
5) We customized Drupal ad geoip module to implement the feature whereby advertisements and headers can be displayed based on users location.
6) Team at Ebizon designed and developed an interface so that any request from a teacher on web form/contact form is fed into automatic teacher creation form. This also allowed admin to delete the irrelevant requests.
7) We customized Drupal moderate module and designed an interface where teaches can see all the comments in a classroom and can approve or disapprove them.
8) We developed custom module UserLoginBar to shows up username, password, submit button block in a single line that is so often the requirement in the new genx websites. We released this module in Drupal.org as a sponsored module by BrassTacksDesign.
9) Initial recommendation was to use Watchlist module will automatically flag a node or comment if it contains any questionable content (these can be set in the Watchlist settings by adding regular expressions of words that are considered bad). But it flags the word and notifies admin AFTER the comment is posted, which was TOO LATE. Therefore Spam module was utilized to resolve this problem.
10) We could not put a restriction for users to have an email to sign up on Tweentribune.com therefore our bright team found a way for not letting users create their email and instead having system create their email automatically from their Full name. The contrib module that was modified for this purpose was “Localemail” and was made to create email ids automatically for each user and let them register directly on Tweentribune. Ebizon currently maintains this module.
11) We made a provision for the report of all students at one place. We provided a link – “All Students Reports” under “Comment Report” menu.
12) This is still a challenge for us and we are planning to point lighttpd to a different IP.
CLIENT FEEDBACK
“I have worked with developers in the U.S., Europe and India and I must say that the work performed by Ebizon Netinfo has been first class and world class.
Their work on my Drupal site has been absolutely outstanding. They have been almost instantly responsive to my many and varied requests, and they have never disappointed me. They’ve completed every task to my satisfaction.
They know Drupal, PHP and CSS inside and out. They have a vast knowledge of existing modules and use them to great advantage to keep custom develop costs to a minimum.
As a designer, I’ve been impressed with their attention to detail, right down to the pixel. My site looks great thanks to them.
Ebizon Netinfo has delivered excellent value for the money I’ve spent with them. Plus, they’re fun to work with!”
~Alan Jacobson
Managing Director, Tweentribune.com
President, BrassTacksDesign