Drupal Development

Fé. Soul Communication & Research realized - with support from IKEA - the ILIV web project: an online information platform.

This platform gives an insight/inside in the daily life at “home” of the average Belgian by qualitative research results, interviews, photo series and blog posts.

As a partner of Fé. Soul Communication & Research, Krimson was asked to monitor the web design and provide the development, deployment, documentation and training for this project.

* Our Client - CultuurNet Vlaanderen

UiTinVlaanderen.be (formerly cultuurweb.be) is a webproject initiated by the Flemish institute CultuurNet Vlaanderen on behalf of the Flemish Minister of Culture, and is a part of UiTnetwerk.

UiTinVlaanderen.be collects and distributes the most complete cultural and leisure event data for the Flanders and Brussels region.

UiTinVlaanderen.be gathers its event data in the UiTdatabank trough the input of individual users and organizations and distributes them to up to 270 channels s.a. websites, mobile websites, widgets, a Philips TV application and Smartphone applications.

All data is distributed via a REST API and widgets (that actually use the API themselves).

Krimson realized the next aspects for this project:

• redesign of UiTinVlaanderen.be;
• migration to Drupal 7;
• refactory of the CultuurNet API module suite to work with Drupal 7 (REST);
• development of the CultureFeed module suite (REST/OAuth).

* CNAPI: A Drupal module suite that gives users access to the client's data

On top of the REST API, a suite of Drupal modules (CNApi - CultuurNet API module suite) was developed. One of these modules provides a PHP layer (with caching, defaults, ...) to easily work with the API as a developer. Another one provides an interface to browse and search the data. All modules are SEO and performance optimized.

Using the suite of modules, CultuurNet Vlaanderen and its partners have already launched tens of websites and applications, targeting users by region (local event sites), audience (sites for children, ...) or platforms (mobile site, Philips TV application).

UiTinVlaanderen is CultuurNet's own window on its full data. Users can browse all events in Flanders. This site already exists for a few years, and was now migrated to Drupal 7, including an upgrade of the CNAPI module suite. This site has slowly been tuned to improve usability and SEO and has won (or was nominated for) several usability awards and site of the year awards.

* UiTiD : One user profile for many websites

Parallel with the Drupal 7 migration project, CultuurNet wanted to launch UiTiD. UiTiD provides a central user profile system that is used to log in over multiple cultural websites. This way CultuurNet (and its partners) can build a profile of a user's cultural identity by allowing users to express what they like, what they are attending, ... .

Based on this data, they can then provide recommendations to encourage users to attend more cultural activities. UiTiD is technically implemented by the CultureFeed API, a REST API with OAuth authentication. To make Drupal work with this API, a CultureFeed module suite was developed, that provides the OAuth authentication procedure and a basic set of pages and blocks to allow users to browse recommendations, user profiles, ... .

* Technical challenges

As all data and all users are not living in Drupal, but are living on API's, we had to build a bridge between API objects and users and Drupal nodes and users. To manage this, a shadow node concept was developed.

For each object on the API, an matching node is stored in Drupal. This shadow node only stores the ID of the API object, so it knows how to fetch the actual data. Nodes are created on the fly (and not synced!), only when they are needed (when the object is displayed or an action happens upon it).

By having the objects in Drupal as nodes, we can make use of Drupal's thousands of modules that work with nodes (like forward, flag, ...).

Users are created on the fly too when their profile is viewed or when they log in. To allow them to login a OAuth authentication procedure is used.

MuseScore.com is a web project founded by Thomas Bonte, Nicholas Froment and Werner Schweer.

Using the leading free and open source music notation software MuseScore, this online platform allows its users to create, learn, find, share and rate sheet music.

In the summer of 2008, the core MuseScore developers decided to abandon their static website and turn MuseScore into a proper community website using Drupal 6.

Krimson was asked to co-develop some (parts of) features and modules for the MuseScore platform: a.o. the

• implementation of Commerce with Ubercart
• integration of Heartbeat
• development of the annotations on music scores
• developement of an Organic Groups contrib module

Strong partnership delivers easy to use website
Suzuki Belgium, a renowned car brand, engaged AGConsult to deliver a new concept and Krimson to build a multilingual, flexible and user friendly website for Suzuki Belgium and Suzuki Luxembourg.


Features in the spotlight

Suzuki Belgium is now able to easily manage the extensive collection of information about its’ cars and models through the Drupal backend. This includes pricing, model packages, technical records, discount deals, premium and much more!

End users can now discover detailed information about models and cars, displayed in a beautiful and easy to access design. Using the car-selector tool, they can search for Suzuki models which meet their preferences. The dealer-locator lets them find a car dealer or workshop in their region.

In other words, selecting a dream car has never been so easy!

Drupal contributions

The Suzuki web project allowed Krimson to foster the Imagemaker module development. This module is being maintained by our very own Krimson ninja Kristof de Jaeger (aka Swentel). Imagemaker makes it possible to add markers or descriptions on any image field.

Drupal, the perfect toolkit for your media website? Sure thing!

Krimson and DOP teamed up with the video-platform specialists at Bluebilly Wig to build a generic, white-label Drupal install for the regional TV and radio broadcasters in the Netherlands.

Via the consortium ROOS (Stichting Regionale Omroep Overleg en Samenwerking), 13 (!) agencies collaborate on a broad range of activities, a.o. their websites. The consortium chose Drupal as its web publishing platform.

The two pioneers among the broadcaster for this webproject are RTV West and Omroep Zeeland. During spring 2011, we implemented and launched their websites using the white-label Drupal install.

Technical

At the start of the project, the main focus was maximum flexibility and a minimum extra effort for the editors to publish their content to the web from their newsroom software. The sites are based upon Pressflow - the high performance Drupal distribution.
A generic importer was built so every broadcaster can link their newsroom software to the Drupal site. All newscontent, images, video & audio gets imported into Drupal via this connector. A second connector pushes this information from Drupal to the VMS portal of Bluebilly Wig to encode the mediafiles for web-playback. Video and audio are played through the custom ROOS-videoplayer, built by Bluebilly Wig.

This way editors are hardly confronted with the Drupal backend. Most of the content comes throughout these import connectors. Apart from that a flexible theming template was built to be able to implement very different looking websites for each broadcaster.

Keep track of the other broadcasters of the ROOS consortium: in the upcoming months they will launch their renewed websites, based on the ROOS/white-label Drupal CMS!