St. Margaret’s School is an independent, all-girls day and boarding school in Victoria, BC. Classes range from the Early Learning Program for three and four-year-olds to Grade 12, plus a certified International English Language Program that prepares students to graduate confident in the English language and to achieve success at universities and colleges in Canada, the US, and beyond. All of St. Margaret’s programs have a low student-teacher ratio and a small-scale learning environment that offers many opportunities for students to contribute to their school community, whether it’s through experiential programs or extracurricular activities that promote an active and balanced lifestyle.

• Responsive design
• Audience driven navigation and sorting
• Rotating banner
• Site search
• Webform
• User login
• News
• Events listing
• Events calendar
• Share features
• FAQs
• Mega footer

This July, the Stanford School of Engineering (SoE) relaunched their website, finalizing a nine month project.

The first Phase of the project (completed in January) focused on migrating and combining content from a legacy HTML and custom PHP MS SQL application. The following link provides more details on the Drupal Migration efforts.

The second Phase of this project:

Built the infrastructure for content sharing between the SoE site and the Mechanical Engineering site as well as future department sites

Completely reworked the IA

Developed a new Twitter Bootstrap/Stanford Framework based theme — now available across Stanford

Included support for Nginx, Varnish, and Apache Solr

Migrated an earlier in-house SoE Drupal site (engineering-info.stanford.edu)

Initiated a new rich Content Strategy

And saw the release of several Kit-compliant Features on Stanford's new F-server

Content-Sharing Infrastructure

Stanford needed a lightweight way to share faculty bios, news/press releases, and similar content across sites. Drupal Connect created an XML/RSS Views/Feeds solution that provides simple, one-way sharing from SoE. This will allow department sites, like Mechanical Engineering relaunching August 2012, to enrich their users' visits and stay up-to-date without the extra costs and duplication of manual efforts.

The success and need of the content sharing at SoE reconfirmed our decision and inspired us to redouble our efforts to build our next-generation Drupal distribution for universities, Trekk.

A New IA

As part of Stanford's new rich experience strategy, Drupal Connect created an information architecture that makes it easy for students, alumni, and faculty/staff to find the information they are looking for and to discover the amazing work that the university is undertaking every day. The new IA was integral to Stanford's updated Content Strategy and will continue to serve the site as the content and experiences evolve.

SoE Theme

The new theme is image rich, but the code is light-weight using a base theme built on top of Twitter's Bootstrap. The new theme also incorporates custom design accents from North Studio that truly make the site pop while maintaining Stanford branding guidelines.

Varnish, Nginx, and Apache Solr

As part of our efforts to improve page speed delivery, reduce costs, and provide scalability; Drupal Connect installed and configured Varnish. Stanford's unique infrastructure also required SSL for all logins and integration with a custom Apache module, WebAuth--which ties into Stanford's Kerberos system. In order to keep the setup simple, Drupal Connect also installed and configured Nginx as a lightweight SSL endpoint that proxies requests over SSL to Apache and caches static assets for improved performance.

In coordination with the new Content Strategy, Drupal Connect installed and configured Apache Solr with several custom search pages. By using Solr, SoE visitors will find more relevant results faster.

The use of these new technologies and communication with Stanford's Web Services has established best-practices for Stanford at-large.

Conclusion

Altogether, the Phase 2 implementation:

Gives SoE visitors a better experience

Extends the reach of the External Relations enabling users to discover exciting news

Ensures up-to-date content

Reduces duplication

Saves costs

And establishes best-practices and reusable components across Stanford's campus

For over 25 years, Stuwalk Energy has supplied and operated a vast network of public and private cardlocks in remote areas of Northern BC. They offer both traditional and unique distribution methods—fleet trucks, rail delivery and off-road bush trucks—that get fuel where it needs to go. Stuwalk focuses primarily on the natural gas extraction industry, but also serves the fuel needs of local communities.

• Responsive design
• Site rebuild
• Product catalogue
• Map view for all locations

Stevens Institute of Technology Launches onto Drupal

SIT Launches 8 Bleeding-edge Drupal Sites

This summer, Drupal Connect finalized a nine-month engagement with Stevens Institute of Technology that represents evolutionary work on multiple fronts. The new websites modernize Stevens' web presence, improve mobile and tablet reach, standardize the technology stack, and enrich the user experience. Drupal Connect's efforts also significantly improve the speed and efficiency of web administration, while reducing duplication and costs.

Responsive Design and an Increased Reach

Given Stevens' significant international appeal and the prevalence of mobile phones and tables as primary browsing devices, Drupal Connect created an HTML5 Responsive Design interface that adapts to wide, standard, narrow, tablet (portrait and landscape), and iPhone/Android (portrait and landscape) screens. For example, the theme adjusts elements in the News Events slider and gracefully resizes videos and typography. The new theme means more alumni, donors, and prospective students can view the sites in meaningful and full-featured ways.

APIs and Content Sharing Improve Browsing Experience and Reduce Costs

Stevens' had a large amount of back-end data — courses, staff bios, publications, patents, etc — that had traditionally been manually entered and maintained on the websites. This led not only to duplication of efforts, but also out-of-date information, minor inaccuracies, and typos. Drupal Connect collaborated with Stevens' in-house IT team to set up secure APIs exposing the back-end data to the Drupal sites.

The central "Hub" site consumes the API data (JSON) and in turn, shares it with the rest of the sites. In addition to the back-end systems data, Drupal Connect also built-in the capability for the Hub to share its own content as Drupal nodes, JSON, or HTML endpoints. The other sites act as clients, flexibly displaying content as appropriate. For example, Stevens' needed consistency across the News Events sliders, so these are actually shared as HTML and consumed by a custom Panels plugin. Other data have looser restrictions and are shared as Drupal nodes, enabling client sites to use the nodes in Views, Panels, or Display Suite as needed. Drupal Connect also created a system of roles, permissions, and workflows to let Stevens manage certain content centrally, but still ensured School and Department autonomy.

The APIs and Content Sharing removed a significant maintenance burden and opened-up new possibilities for sharing news and events across the sites. The benefits are easiest to see in the cross-listed courses and faculty, but are interwoven throughout the sites.

Migrating onto Drupal

Drupal Connect migrated hundreds of legacy pages from multiple technology platforms using our Flatfish library. By using Flatfish, we were able to avoid messy 64-bit Oracle database support issues and start the migration work almost immediately.

By intelligently migrating all of the old content into the new Drupal sites, Stevens was able to review and curate the content over the course of several weeks — something that would have been an impossibility in their old systems.

In the early fall of 2010, DrupalConnect began working on Waste Management Inc.'s high-profile, high-traffic collection of recycling and green-living sites, collectively under greenopolis.com, as part of a long-term reorganization and revitalization effort.

ThinkGreenRewards.com

Drupal Connect recently redesigned Waste Management's new, flagship community recycling program, Think Green Rewards. ThinkGreenRewards.wm.com has a beautiful, modern design with an intuitive UI that makes for a pleasant UX across the site's broad demographics. DrupalConnect employed all of the latest theming techniques with jQuery, image sprites, and css3 on top of a 960 grid with a stylish font via cufon for an elegant and bold Web presence.

Theming Technologies

• Custom theme
• 960 grid system
• jQuery
• CSS3
• Image Sprites
• Proprietary font usage via cufon

Greenopolis.com

We hit the ground running, committing code early on, and put out our first release within two weeks. We brought in additional resources to facilitate top-notch and on-time deployments, focusing on developing new code and fixing and enhancing old code. Two main areas stood out as great concern for our client:

Development Milestones

• Major refactoring to the backbone of the sites—the consumer recycling transaction processing
• Automating the integration of recycling data from Waste Management facilities
• Developing thousands of lines of new code
• Maintaining thousands of lines of legacy code
• Extending and customizing of Ubercart and views

High Traffic

• Pressflow 6.19
• Load-balanced web servers
• MySQL Database Cluster
• Memcached
• Gluster FS
• APC
• Varnish
• 20k visits per day