5 challenges we faced at MSNBC

Two years ago, Lullabot joined MSNBC to migrate content from their legacy sites into a single Drupal installation with a new editorial and publishing workflow. Now MSNBC.com broadcasts two news channels online, has a solid development workflow, and is in constant evolution. In this session we will cover the 5 most remarkable challenges that we faced together.

Structuring fields (so many of them)

• Shared fields are into a module along with their logic.
• Kept the data model in a spreadsheet to fine tune the usage of each field.
• Videos where custom entities but then moved them to nodes for easier integration in nodequeues and embedded content.

Making the front end flexible and dynamic

• Made the header and footer embeddable with Angularjs so partner sites could use it.
• Moved many components to be processed client side.
• Used AngularJS forms instead of Drupal forms whenever possible.
• Drupal Behaviors interact with AngularJS modules via events or the Drupal JavaScript object.

Peer reviewing code

• Pull request per ticket. Someone in the team has to review it before it is merged.
• Automated testing environments per pull request made it possible for non-tech people to chime in.
• CasperJS tests are run on testing environments to avoid regressions.

Making sql-sync fast

• sql-sync took two hours. Even after excluding tables.
• Trimmed large fields.
• Tried to delete old revisions and failed miserably.
• Made it blazing fast via parallel processing.

Optimizing the workflow

• Code flows downstream. Data flows upstream.
• One single process to update the database.
• Branch and release management through Jenkins.
• Hosting in Acquia. Fine tuned its deployment hooks.