PBS
PBS Engage is a “social media” website designed to foster innovative interaction and connections between and among PBS’s viewers and programs. Begun as an experiment in 2007, PBS Engage allows users to to receive updates and even comment on their favorite PBS shows. The site allows PBS a place to explore and develop new ways for their viewers to interact online - including an interactive, live chat where users submit and rate questions for PBS guests. The original, prototyped version of the site was developed by the San Francisco based Flax Media and Fluent Studios. Chapter Three was brought into the fold as the “Drupal Expert,” put in charge of the transition from prototype to fully functioning Drupal website, complete with back-end content management features. Using Drupal, PBS Engage was able to dramatically simplify the site’s administration and easily build out a number of new features by taking advantage of existing open source Drupal module code. One of the primary goals of the project, aside from building out and perfecting the core functionality of the original prototype, was to create an elegant, back-end content management system that could be used and permissioned to meet PBS’s organizational needs. By drawing upon Drupal’s existing CMS core functionality and access permissioning, Chapter Three was able to create a simple “administrative interface” that is currently used to manage and add to the site’s content.
- Drupalizing: The original website was written as a custom “homegrown” solution and Chapter Three was tasked with efficiently mapping and migrating the prototyped site’s functionality to its Drupal equivalents.
- Elegant Content Management System: To support the needs of PBS’s many editors and site administrators, a customized administrative interface was implemented on top of Drupal’s CMS functionality to allow easy management of the site’s content.
- XML Feed Integration: PBS uses XML feeds to internally distribute much of their organizational content and PBS Engage had to process and store content from dozens of external XML feeds.
- Flash Application Integration: As part of its experimental nature, PBS Engage contains a number of customized Flash applications whose source data integrates with and is manageable by Drupal.
