GiveWell was founded in 2007 by a team of donors. Their mission was to help donors give to the “right people”. In other words, the Charities that needed the most. It publishes the list of Charities along with the complete details. They make sure to keep updating the list at all times.
In 2009, Givewell contacted us to create a custom theme “Ebgivebetter” for their site www.givewell.org. They wanted their site to convey their mission & what they do. The fact that they didn’t want to take any chances, they contacted us as they felt we had the required expertise to do the job.
It was almost 2 years they were in public domain. By then, people started knowing GiveWell. With growing traffic and footfalls, maintaining the repository was becoming a challenge for the team.
Not only theme development but we also helped them on simplifying repository and database management. Within 2 months of the launch, the new look website reached a lucrative segment of the population.
Moving to Drupal 7
In 2011, GiveWell contacted us again. Their website was built on Drupal 5 which needed an upgrade.
Findings
On analyzing their site, we found the following –
- The modules were outdated.
- The repository had gone obsolete.
- The website was not performing to its fully capacity. It was struggling to keep up to the rising traffic.
- GiveWell needed an urgent upgrade to Drupal 7.
Plan
We decided to iron out the issues moving the website to the latest Drupal version. Based on their Wishlist and our recommendation, we planned to implement the following features.
- A simple, and a solid website that was easy to use with a refined interface
- Ability to authenticate new users before allowing full access to the site
- Ability to upload and share blogs on the site
- Ability to manage email updates on the site
- Provide users with an easy-to-use content specific search system
- Ability to maintain the data repository
- Provide security and safety to user data
- Simplify content management for the webmaster
Execution
All items were carefully executed as per the plan. We made sure –
- That all custom modules were upgraded separately as per Drupal 7 standards
- One of the required modules for the site was available in Drupal 5, and Drupal 6, but not in Drupal 7; hence a custom upgrade was performed for the same.
- Due to the presence of junk characters in the Content, the representation of table content was not in proper format. Our team identified the issue and performed separate scripting for it.
We planned the update before implementing it to the system, as an upgrade process includes changes to the core. Such a practice reduces the risk involved in moving from one version to another. It can result in loss of database information or even malfunctioning of the system.
Our team updated the site, tested it and then made an upgrade.
Result
Our team carefully executed the migration to the new version. We implemented the best of development practices which ensured seamless and successful completion of the project with in the stipulated time frame.
GiveWell was extremely satisfied the way the entire project process was carried out. We were equally happy working on the same, more importantly, we could contribute to the cause.