Lullabot Case Studies

Harvard Graduate School of Design

abbey — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:21:34 -0700

Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) decided to use Drupal to create an intranet for the students to use to communicate and collaborate during the school year. Lullabot was brought on to help architect the site, matching their needs to Drupal modules and helping assess potential trouble areas and custom code needs. Once building the site began, we helped with troubleshooting and best practices as well as code review and development mentoring for the site's custom theme. Now that the site is live for the 2009 school year, we are continuing the relationship to assist with any troubleshooting and new feature questions.

The site provides forums, a question and answer board, and group blogs in addition to an imported university event calendar. Most of the site uses stock Drupal modules, with very little custom module development - a few alter tweaks and custom functionality in a site-specific module and a custom authentication module to integrate with the Harvard-wide HUID login system. The Organic Groups module was used to provide several kinds of blogs. Students can have multiple blogs in a variety of categories and they may choose to make them private or publicly available. This way a student may have a personal blog as well as several group blogs for various projects or activities. The site has an extensive custom theme, which heavily customized the way all of the views are displayed as well as creating a clean, useful profile page.

Fast Company

abbey — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:13:50 -0700

Fast Company is a magazine for business professionals following innovation, technology, leadership and social responsibility. The new FastCompany.com web site combines rich editorial content with advanced networking tools for industry watchers and professionals. The redesign of the online magazine was the second project that Lullabot teamed up with Mansueto Digital, the first being IncBizNet.

When Mansueto Publishing began planning their relaunch of the Fast Company web site (http://www.fastcompany.com), they wanted to build more than an online magazine. They needed to tie in customizable news feeds, integrating an existing 100,000 member business networking site, and a blog-inspired collaborative approach to industry and business news. We worked with a large team to translate their designs into Drupal solutions, and helped train their internal team to continue managing and building the site as it evolved.

Sony MyPlay

abbey — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:54:52 -0700

SonyBMG's MyPlay site (née Musicbox) is a multimedia showcase for their artists. It provides video, music, and photos that can be rated and reviewed by the users. Users can also track their favorites and build a network of friends on the site.

Lullabot did the original development for the Musicbox video website in 2006. Then in the summer of 2007 Lullabot came back in to the project to upgrade the site to Drupal 5 as well as expanding it beyond videos. During that process we also helped them build their internal Drupal team. We worked side-by-side with their team while building the new site to bring them up to speed on the existing work as well as turning them into Drupal ninjas.

Moving forward with Lullabot in a consulting role the SonyBMG team rolled out a rebranding/redesign of Musicbox to MyPlay in Spring 2008.

Lifetime TV

robert — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 09:32:51 -0700

Lifetime Television is one of the most popular cable networks in the United States. When the television network decided to relaunch LifetimeTV.com entirely on the Drupal platform, they brought in the Lullabot team to provide architecture, training, and guidance for the project.

The project began with intensive on-site training to help the company's development team quickly acquire the skills and connect with the resources that they would need to build this complex Drupal-based web application.

Lullabot also provided ongoing high-level guidance on everything from development best practices and quality assurance to user experience to performance and scalability and server infrastructure recommendations. We worked closely with several external service providers to assure that Lifetime was able to meet its ambitious goals. And Lullabot also oversaw expansion and further development of many existing Drupal modules which were needed to meet Lifetime's specific needs.

Sony BMG Multisite

nate — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:11:40 -0700

Doug Gottlieb first approached Lullabot while he was working at Rolling Stone Magazine. He came with a vision: a large multisite installation of a conglomerate of sites. He recognized the incredible inefficiencies in separately maintaining dozens of websites with little or no relationship to each other, each having completely different code and systems.

Though the idea didn't take at Rolling Stone, Doug returned to us several months later with a different spin on the same goal: Develop a system for maintaining and launching websites for the entire stable of artists for Sony BMG Records. Besides a shared codebase, the new sites would have a distinct advantage over their predecessors: community content.

Forums are the most common aspect of community website, but Sony wanted more: content rating, friend lists, photo sharing, video upload and manipulation, contests, and direct communication between band members and fans. The new websites provided a central location for fans to join, share, and collaborate, providing large amounts of content that couldn't be matched by editors and band members.

See the links below for sites currently launched on the multisite platform.

Participant Productions

nate — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:07:05 -0700

Participant Productions is a film company whose mandate is "to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all". They wanted a way to encourage their audiences to "participate" in the issues surrounding their films and the result is www.participate.net, a highly customized Drupal site where every visitor can become a user, and every user can have their own blog. Celebrity bloggers include the film's directors, actors, writers, producers, and known public figures involved in the issues. The site also offers "action" items and incentives such as giveaways and a Participant of the Month.

Good Storm

nate — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:10:57 -0700

Looking to deploy a Drupal site using the ecommerce package written by Lullabot, we helped them map out their vision into implementation strategies and a deliverables roadmap for their development team.

OurBrisbane.com

angie — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:00:00 -0800

OurBrisbane.com was looking to move their site from a proprietary CMS to an open source solution, and add in several new community features in the process. Drupal was the obvious choice, and the Lullabots were there to help architect and plan the migration.

We helped OurBrisbane.com's development team map their site's requirements to Drupal modules, and developed a plan for migrating site features to node types, taxonomy vocabularies, and views.

New America Foundation

angie — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:00:00 -0800

The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, post-partisan, public policy institute that was established through the collaborative work of a diverse and intergenerational group of public intellectuals, civic leaders and business executives. Their Drupal website is a tool used both to self-organize and to communicate these ground-breaking ideas to the outside world.

Lullabot helped on this website with both consulting on this project, and some development and theming work on some of the trickier bits. The New America Foundation website has extensive use of Views, CCK, Taxonomy, Actions and Workflow modules to achieve their publishing requirements.

Numerous modules were contributed to the Drupal community during the course of this project, including Contemplate, Revision Moderation, Path Redirect, and Primary Term.

AMBuzz

angie — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:00:00 -0700

Anderson Merchandisers, who handle movie, music, and book distribution to Wal-Mart stores, needed to update their Plone intranet site to something more scalable that could additional handle community features. Enter Drupal.

The Lullabots helped acclimate the Anderson Merchandisers folks with Drupal, helped map their requirements to Drupal modules, taxonomy, node types, and views, and connected them with resources in the community to help extend various contributed modules (such as CCK, Date, Organic Groups, and Workflow modules) to meet their needs. Lullabot also has provided ongoing consulting and high-level advice for the project.

BBC/PRI's The World

angie — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:00:00 -0700

The World is a daily news and analysis radio program, bringing international news to an American audience. Their Drupal-powered site offers podcasts of their radio program content, as well as other associated content.

Lullabot helped with some custom development and theming work to bring parts of the site together, as well as providing some best-practice tips and advice. The site makes extensive use of Taxonomy and Views for categorizing various segments.

In addition to a Lullabot article on Custom Paging for Views, this project also resulted in documentation in the Drupal Handbook for Views Argument Handling Code.

Songbird

nate — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 18:51:29 -0700

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Oh yeah, and they're using Drupal.

Buy Blue

nate — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 18:29:49 -0700

With the need to create company profiles containing large subsets of data and intricate relationships between content and still perform well under high traffic conditions, it was obvious Drupal was needed for this task. From community moderated content to dynamic bar-graph generation, BuyBlue.org is a compelling and informative web system.

MTV.co.uk

nate — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:46:52 -0700

Lullabot has partnered with MTV Networks UK & Ireland to provide back-end support and management to the newly updated mtv.co.uk consumer website. Using Drupal technology the site will continue to host news and information for all of MTV UK's current broadcast channels but will provide an enhanced user experience through use of Drupalâ€™s community ready core functionality.

TWiT

nate — Wed, 03 May 2006 19:33:56 -0700

Leo Laporte is probably most recognized as the host of the television shows The Screen Savers or Call for Help. He was also a pioneering podcaster with his podcast This Week in Tech (a.k.a. TWiT), which has long been one of the most popular podcasts on the net.

Leo wanted to expand TWiT into an entire network of podcasts and he approached Lullabot about building his new site using Drupal. We helped Leo put together a very flexible installation of Drupal designed to expand with his network. TWiT.tv is now the hub for the more than 14 podcasts in the TWiT network.

Fearless Living

nate — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 17:43:51 -0800

Rhonda Britten is a life coach and the star of the daytime reality television show "Starting Over". Her web site tests the limits of Drupal with extensive features such as paid memberships giving access to private content, member discounts, workshop purchases, downloadable e-books, message boards, and mailing lists. Development of this site contributed over 10 new modules into the Drupal repository.