ThirdAge

Website: ThirdAge

Client: ThirdAge

Dates: August 2007 - August 2008

Scope: 330 developer days

Partners: HUGE

Description: By far our largest project, the launch of the new ThirdAge site required a year of dedicated effort and over 330 developer days from start to finish. ThirdAge, a destination website for baby-boomers, has been on the web for more than a decade. With over five hundred thousands pieces of content dating back to 1998, and a staggeringly broad set of features spread across many generations of toolsets, ThirdAge decided a little over a year ago to port their entire stack to Drupal. We were brought on to lead the development effort and build out their new back end, while the top notch design firm HUGE worked on a fresh new design of the site from the ground up. From the integrated new email blast system, article archive, quizzes, lessons, games, question and answers, profiles, and tons of other feature sets, we built over twenty-five custom modules to implement all of the site’s functional requirements.

The decision to utilize Drupal for ThirdAge was not made lightly. Compared to the established services around other proprietary systems, such as Vignette, for a company like ThirdAge developing a Drupal site is a relatively uncharted path. While the long term dividends paid by leveraging the creative works of the thousands of contributing developers to Drupal are readily apparent, there is still a huge gap between features implemented in modules and end-user friendly screens a site editor can hand over to staff to use on a day to day basis. Most of the work we focus on at Chapter Three is really in closing this gap and helping provide a seamless experience for ThirdAge contributors and users.

One of the biggest advantages of Drupal is the ability it gives adopting organizations to ‘own’ their platform. With Drupal they have the opportunity to have complete flexibility and control over their technology destiny. They can bring on one or more new servicing firms, train staff internally to develop new features, or both, all with the guarantee that their web site software will be continually supported and advanced by the wider Drupal community. This can’t practically happen without a considerable amount of training. While developing ThirdAge, we had the opportunity to work side-by-side with their development staff members, thus imparting requisite knowledge and practical understanding of Drupal and the internals of the site.

Features:

• Custom administration: ThirdAge has over a dozen editors and contracted staff that write content for the site. We designed and built custom administration and workflow management tools that allowed ThirdAge staff members to draft, edit, and publish their content across the sites different sections and content systems.
• Content and context sensitive advertising: ThirdAge’s business revolves around their advertisement services. We designed and built a content and context sensitive advertising placing system that took advantage of Drupal’s extensive tagging system. Advertisements were served and targeted based on a complex algorithm taking into account current page being viewed, user’s historical browsing habits, and information entered into the user’s site profile.
• Article browsing: With tens of thousands of pages of content spread across many different site sections, we developed Drupal solutions that allowed editorially to easily place and present their article content in a variety of different use cases. From how-to articles, to glossaries, to slide-shows, we made it easy for ThirdAge to publish and manage their content. Lists of articles were created to show the most recent, most popular, and most related articles for each section of the site.
• Search engine optimization: ThirdAge relies on organic traffic from search engines. Building off of Drupal’s solid SEO base level support, working with specialists to craft a industry best SEO focused site architecture.
• Social networking: With rich profiles, photo management, buddylists, address books, and more we helped ThirdAge launch with industry competitive social networking tools tuned to their demographic.
• Audit System: With hundreds of thousands of articles of content spread across multiple legacy systems to import ThirdAge needed a way to process and publish their content in the cleanest formatted markup possible. We designed and developed a content audit and entry system inside Drupal that enabled their staff to do just that.
• External content integration: We built a system that seamlessly imports and integrates content on ThirdAge from over a half-dozen remote content providers including EBSCO and Tarot.com. The system automatically pulled content through a variety of different data protocols and seamlessly republished the content inside Drupal.
• Newsletter system: We architected a very sophisticated newsletter system that integrates with industry leader StormPost for email delivery, but leverages Drupal to the fullest for newsletter design and
  content placement. It seamlessly syncs the latest subscriber information collected on the Drupal front end with the newsletter subscriber lists. It also allows for panels based click and drag content placement for
  newsletters allowing editors to pull from all of the live content managed in Drupal.
• Workshop system:We designed and built a remote training system that allows users to electively sign up for training. After reading through lessons users can take quizzes and see their scores and progress
  on to more challenging work.