Brian McMurray

Talks and Presentations

Weathering Storms: How Robin Hood Uses Drupal to Fight Poverty

URL: https://portland2013.drupal.org/node/2528.html
Presenters: Brian McMurray, Steven Merrill, Heather Johnson, Molly Byrnes, John Robert Wilson
Dates Presented: Thursday, May 23, 2013

Your typical day’s traffic barely tips the scales … until Lady Gaga tweets your project and the Black Eyed Peas decide to play Central Park on your behalf. Your crack content team has strategy and messaging down cold … but they need to be developers to do just about anything to your website. Your site looks pretty good, considering it’s age … but your Board wants something radical and punchy for the project launching day-after-tomorrow.

Come get a guided tour to how these challenges were met and bested. Phase2 Technology and the Robin Hood Foundation will break down some key business challenges and lay out the technical architecture underpinning their elegant solution. We’ll talk about clever ways to give content editors both incredible control over their content and amazing powers to develop rich mixed media content on their own. And if you stay till the end we’ll share with you some of the secret sauce that allows this site to gracefully manage traffic spikes of up to 3000% without breaking a sweat.

A panel consisting of representatives from Robin Hood () and Phase2 Technology () will cover the following problem areas and talk about some of the magic behind our solutions:

  • Empowering the Editor: Flexible Content Templates - Highly customizable nested sections that editors can use to build complex new site areas that support embedding of content elements.

  • Multiple Personalities: Microsites: The ability for content editors to transform those complex sections into microsites with their own urls and navigation at the touch of a button to serve the need for quickly creating a highly branded, highly unique “microsite” presence dedicated to an event or project.

  • Bring it On: Highly Scalable Hosting: Strategies for handling the onslaught of celebrity endorsement driven traffic by building for quick and elegant scalability rather than building to (and paying for) an infrastructure to handle the worst-case scenario.