Diginomica is a new type of media property designed to serve the interests of enterprise leaders in the digital era. The first version of it was launched in 2013 on WordPress. The site has been remade on Drupal 8 due to the WordPress' lack of adaptivity to a 21st century CMS and its needs. "I had seen how Drupal is getting into technologies that allow all manner of amazing things to come to life and that encouraged me to take a closer look." - said the founder of Diginomica.
Our scope was to remake a site in a more comprehensive and future-proof way learning from the mistakes made in the past. This way no major visible upgrades were made for the end-users, but the backend has its own improvements. During the migration from WP to D8 we made many structural changes, reorganized the content and threw out the unnecessary features in order to achieve the best possible performance.
Since the platform is 3rd-party-heavy, we just as much needed to rely on the community as much to create custom modules. We provided a new Contextly integration, made several patches for Yoast and customized the Thunder admin theme. During the project, we learned the iframely, Algolia, AMP, Disqus and Parse.ly from inside out to achieve the desired goals.
As a result, we created a platform much faster than WordPress was with a clean backend and an editorial UI already way better than stock Drupal including workflow management for external editors.
Migration:
• We migrated two Wordpress sites to a single Drupal 8.
3rd party integrations:
• Contextly - a smart suggesting system based on the metadata of the content
• Disqus - instant commenting solution
• Algolia - the fastest search we've ever seen
• iframely - the media provider for cca 2000 media types
• Parse.ly - the better version of Google Analytics
• Yoast - SEO optimization service
• AMP - a custom responsive theme for Google's search result cache
Performance:
• We leveraged Drupal 8’s cache tagging to optimize for Pantheon’s global CDN. Result: “Some @diginomica site stats for the nerds - now running 78% faster (close to Google speed), traffic up 15-16% consistently, bounce rate down 3.5%, thanks to @BrainsumCOM” – (Co-founder Den) https://twitter.com/dahowlett/status/1126553143557394433
