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Clarion Site Factory

Event
development

Website Development

design

UX & Design

multilingual

Multilingual

Brief

Clarion required a platform to be created that would allow them to self-serve the creation of new event websites without the need for any developer involvement.

Users of the platform required the ability to choose from a selection of pre-built components and website sections in order to allow them to build event focussed websites themselves, along with all the content loading that goes with this.

This platform was to be called the "Clarion Site Factory".

Solution

The solution centered around Drupal 7 and its powerful Domain module to allow for a single platform, with many "front-ends".

With this foundation in place, the Drupal Paragraphs module and a variety of other custom modules allowed for this "Site Factory" vision to be realised.

Technical highlights

  • Integration with the AWS API so that services within AWS (Route53, CloudFront, S3 etc.) can be dynamically provisioned and maintained from within the Drupal platform.
  • Fully customised and branded Drupal administration pages to give the site management interface a polished SaaS (Software as a Service) feel.
  • Extensive use of the Domain suite of modules to handle customisations per site. Each site is able to have it's own taxonomy terms and menus, along with restricting content to specific sites.
  • Highly customisable components with features such as view options that are passed into the embedded view to filter and sort the content per component.
  • Per-site multilingual functionality so that each site on the platform can have different languages enabled and restrict content translators to only those.
  • Site wizard allows Clarion Admins to set up a new site on the platform from scratch, reducing the Time-to-live - a new site can be generated in as little as 10 minutes.
  • Extended the Domain Settings module to provide a site admin page to control all settings for the site. This includes settings from contrib modules and our own custom variables that allow each site to be fully customised right down to the choice of primary font.
  • Dynamic provisioning of Apache Solr search indexes for each new site that is provisioned.
  • Custom user tables for each site that are created on-the-fly when a new site is deployed. This allows users to be isolated to each site and is also for better scalability.
  • Theme variables can be customise to completely change the look of the theme. We began by giving the choice of three themes, however now we have refactored all of the functionality into one theme that can be customised to look completely different from any other site on the platform.
  • User generated content from companies who can be provisioned their own accounts - including a validation/moderation layer for each respective CSF instance before being made publicly available.
  • Multiple events/sectors per site whereby custom headers and menus can be utilised to effectively facilitate the nesting of websites.
  • Bookmarking functionality which allows end users to save content (such as articles and blogs) in their own private Bookmarks section.
  • DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) integration which allows event managers to configure the placement of adverts on each of their sites on the platform.
Website Screenshot