Blogin arkisto: References

Case: Lily.fi

Lily is an online magazine based on a new social media concept comprised of blogging, sharing and edited, journalistic content. Lily as it can be viewed and read online is created by its users in collaboration with media professionals. Every user can set up a column of their own and share their ideas and views with the community. Lily can also be consumed as a magazine without participating in the content provision. Lily is published by A-lehdet, one of the largest magazine publishers in Finland.

Exove played a central role in implementing Lily.fi. The concept of a community-driven and user-friendly service was designed by A-lehdet digital media. Exove implemented the new service concept onto a technology platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL in close collaboration with A-lehdet digital media specialists. The HTML/CSS templates of the site were built based on layout images provided by A-lehdet and integrated to Drupal by Exove.

The service was built on Drupal, an open source CMS platform. Exove extended Drupal mainly with existing third-party modules, among those ApacheSolr, ApacheSolrAjax, CCK, Views, Drupal for Facebook, Flag, WYSIWYG Imageupload, Imagecache, Nodequeue and Radioactivity. Additionally, some modules were implemented by A-lehdet and Exove to accommodate the need for some highly customized functionality.

Lily.fi was designed to tolerate high loads from the beginning. The site was built considering requirements set by Varnish HTTP accelerator, mainly the cacheability of page loads. In order to achieve this in a generic and scalable way, a new way to control Drupal’s output mechanisms was designed and implemented without interfering with the Drupal core.

Further, a user-friendly and highly customizable interface for bloggers was implemented in the project. The implementation greatly differs from Drupal’s normal content management flow but still relies heavily on ready-made components and was implemented following good Drupal practices.

Sini Liila, Project Manager at A-lehdet digital media, describes the result of the project as follows: “We have worked with Exove before and were confident in diving into this project, knowing the technical end-product would be as specified and as expected. Like before, the collaboration ran smoothly and it was a pleasure to work with the Exove team. For Lily, as a new concept and way of doing things, it was important that any mishaps in either concept design or technical implementation could be corrected ‘on the go’. The few incidents where this kind of agile approach became necessary, Exove was able to follow through and be flexible in finding a remedy quickly.”

The technical implementation for Lily.fi was supervised by Web Developer Tobias Rask of A-lehdet digital media. Tobias highlights the Exove role in the project as follows: “ Working with Exove was easy and convenient. They implemented our definitions with professional skill into flexible Drupal site, which is easy to maintain.”
Please check www.lily.fi, for the actual implementation of the service.

Suomi24 / Minä implemented by us

Suomi24 Minä profile service has been implemented by Exove with close collaboration with the Suomi24 team.

Mikko Ristimäki of Suomi24 is speaking about the system tomorrow at our social media seminar (only in Finnish).

About the Project

Minä is the heart of Suomi24, the largest Finnish on-line community with more than 2.3 million of registered users. It is the control panel for updating users status, keeping in touch with friends and being always up-to-date of the interesting information around. Suomi24 also offers Finland’s most popular discussion forum, e-mail services, marketplace, dating services and so on for more than 1.3 million unique users a week.

Exove hold a central role in renewing old profile and network solution. The concept of a community-driven, sharing-based service with high performance requirements was designed by Suomi24. Exove implemented the new service concept onto a existing technology platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL in close collaboration with Suomi24. The HTML/CSS templates of the site were built by Suomi24 and integrated to Drupal by Exove. Perhaps the most notable feature of the system is the tight integration with Apache Solr search engine.

Minä uses about twenty modules, half of which are Drupal contrib. modules and half custom-made modules for specifically Suomi24 needs, implemented by Exove. The most important third-party modules are ApacheSolr, CCK, Content Profile, ImageApi, Friendlist and Heartbeat. Custom modules mostly extend and customise the features provided by third-party modules.

Community section of the service provides users an efficient way to browse interesting user profiles and to find new friends. Search integrates with all social functionality on the site.
In addition to the service implementation Exove migrated the existing Suomi24 Gallery information and centralised user information into almost half a million Minä user profiles.

Pasi Piispa, Product Director at Suomi24, describes the result of the renewal project as follows: “The challenge of the project was to duplicate the functionalities of the old Suomi24 Gallery application on our new Drupal platform and migrate the existing user data to improve the quality of the service. The project was by no means easy or simple, but despite the initial challenges we succeeded in building a foundation for upcoming new features and site wide content integrations, which wouldn’t have been possible on the old platform.”

Overall project and technical implementation was supervised by Mikko Ristimäki, Director of Development and Technology at Suomi24. Mikko highlights the Exove role in the project as follows: “Exove provided flexible and cost efficient way to move Suomi24 community features into our core Drupal platform. The team was experienced and provided good insights and best practises on how to build and manage large scale Drupal platforms.”

Please check http://mina.suomi24.fi/yhteisö and see the service yourself.

Eazybreak in news

Eazybreak is a mobile voucher company that is challenging the status quo in lunch, sports, and culture vouchers market first in Finland, and later in other countries. Their look’n'feel, sites and systems are designed and implemented by Exove.

Their innovative concept has been picked up by Helsingin Sanomat, Kauppalehti, and Taloussanomat. All articles are in Finnish.

Fiskars Garden sites

Fiskars is a leading global supplier of consumer products for the home, garden and outdoors. Fiskars products are renowned for their functionality and cutting-edge design, and the Group has a strong portfolio of trusted international brands including Fiskars, Iittala, Gerber, Silva, and Buster.

Exove has played a central role in designing and implementing the new Fiskars global consumer sites onto an Open Source platform. The service was built on eZ Publish, an open source CMS platform that offers versatile content management capabilities, good usability for content editors, and flexible development tools for developers. The developed system spans 30 countries and geographical areas across the globe.
The goal was to create an integrated environment to contain all Fiskars consumer product categories ranging from crafting to gardening. In the past different product lines had dedicated websites causing cost overhead and content fragmentation.

The concept, layouts and Flash elements were created by the Fiskars’ internal marketing team. Exove handled the technical execution from template design to system customization to deployment. eZ Publish was integrated to external systems such as the ZipBurst store locator and SureSource eCommerce system. Automatic prefilling of customer service forms with product data and customer image uploads enhance the web as a channel for customer service.

As the project schedule was tight, site development and content entry was done in parallel. To further accelerate the content entry process Exove also migrated about 750 product items from the legacy IBM WebSphere platform automatically, freeing up Fiskars’ resources for other tasks.

The project had a few focal areas to ensure best of breed user experience, content promotion, and product findability: system flexibility, rich media support, search, and search engine optimisation.

Flexibility
By default Content Management Systems often limit the end users to do a limited set of tasks. In Fiskars’ case the company had a technically capable in-house team that wished they could create custom content into the system. Exove implemented the system in a way that allows the customer to embed custom content such as campaign pages independently without the need for Exove’s intervention.

In addition to custom pages the system allows content elements in the right column to be managed through the eZ Publish interface. This allows Fiskars’ to independently create unique sets of content for a certain section. For example, the right column can hold promotional banners, external JavaScript widgets and rich text content.

During the specification phase some features – such as web store and store finder – were identified to be available only on some sites. Exove implemented them as site features that can be disabled or enabled. This keeps template development structured and allows Fiskars to roll out features to selected country sites only.

Rich media support and content delivery
In addition to text and image content the platform also supports the publishing of video online. Fiskars had an archive of existing video content ranging from individual product promotion videos to series of videos – such as Fiskars TV. Video objects are placed in the media library and linked to dedicated video pages. Links to video objects in rich text content areas open the videos in a modal window.

Section landing pages on the site hold a Flash element that can also be managed using the default eZ Publish administration elements. The main Flash element is integrated to eZ Publish using a custom XML format specified by the Fiskars’ internal team. The banner can hold images or embedded Flash animations.

To ensure content distribution with minimal overhead Exove installed and configured the Varnish reverse proxy to serve all static content such as video, images, stylesheets and JavaScript.

Search
Designing an information architecture for hundreds of products is a challenge. In addition to navigating to the individual products using the navigation it is essential to provide the visitors with a robust search function. eZ Publish has an integrated search extension (eZ Find) based on the popular Open Source search engine Solr.

By using eZ Find Exove was able to provide Fiskars with site wide search functionality with minimal effort. Using Solr the search functionality yields relevant results in milliseconds. Additionally, eZ Find enables content editors to elevate selected content elements when a certain keyword is used in the search – thus allowing internal advertisements and content promotions.

The search index spans all content stored in eZ Publish, including metadata such as content author and keywords.

Search engine optimisation
To ensure optimal search engine visibility the templates were designed to allow crawlers unrestricted access to all content. Using the progressive enhancement ideology every content item is available even to clients without advanced features such as JavaScript or Adobe Flash. In addition to technical features, project focused on writing proper page titles, descriptions, metadata, and payed extra attention to cross linking and other factors contributing to improving search engine rank.

Automated sitemap generation guarantees that search engines index the available content as soon as possible. The sitemaps protocol is supported by most of the popular search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. Duplicate indexing is of content prevented by using the canonical meta-tag.

Please visit the country sites for garden tools found at www.fiskars.com, under country selector.

Some recent works

We’ve been busy even during the hot summer months, and released some nice sites for our customers. Here are some selected picks:

Mediscale
Mediscale provides medical decision support systems for physicians to get analyses of their patients’ status. We have designed and implemented their site on top of WordPress. The project included visual design, implementation, and training.

Eran Lagon, CEO at MediScale, describes the result of the site project as follows: “We received great recommendations about exove and I was happy to see that they even exceeded our expectations. The dedicated product team completely understood our business requirements and the work was constantly done with collaboration of our company. Not only that exove definitely know how to build useful and beautiful sites, but they also understand startups and how to work with them. Highly recommended!”

The site can be found at www.mediscale.com.

Gamebooktour and Golfpiste Invitational
We have been co-operating with Free Drop Innovations for a year now, and the main Golfgamebook.com project has spun off a couple golf event related sites. These sites provide a live leaderboard, pictures, and comments during the game, and store the results and the discussion for later reference.

We were responsible for the visual design and site implementation, including integrations to Twitter and Flickr for live comments and photos.

Check out the sites at www.gamebooktour.fi and www.golfpisteinvitational.com. The main site is located at www.golfgamebook.com.

Maku.fi
We implemented www.maku.fi site together with A-lehdet that publishes Maku magazine. The site is a gateway to thousands of recipes that are shown in a fresh and invigorating manner to the visitors. Besides the recipes, the site provides also instructions, ideas, and inspiration for people interesting in cooking.

Golfgamebook.com

We are extremely happy to announce that we have been working for several months on a very exciting project that brings real-time scoring and social media features to golf. Now the system is live, the iPhone app can be found at the App Store, and golf season is just starting.

Below you’ll find the formal announcement:

Exove has played a central role in Golfgamebook.com concept and visual design, and technical implementation onto Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL technology platform.

The site concept and layout was designed by Union together with Exove and Free Drop Innovations. The emphasis was on bringing the social features of golf, typically discussed mainly in the clubhouses or privately, to larger audience in the Internet. These features were supported by a number of typical social media features fit to the golf environment – such as online friends, discussions, and sharing golf game results.

The service was built on ExoveIgniter, a framework based on CodeIgniter offering a versatile set of social media features. The system was built in a modular fashion that allows easy extensibility and fast upgrades. Based on the concept and visual designs, Exove implemented the required HTML code and integrated it into the system as Smarty templates.

The most important features of the system are live connections to scorecard appliances, including also an iPhone client developed by Qvik, full features social media services, integrations to key external services, and fluid user experience with strong branding.

The implementation project delivered a turnkey solution for the client in a multi-vendor environment.

The co-founders of Free Drop Innovations Kalle Väinölä and Mikko Manerus describe the result of the development project as follows: “GameBook is unique within golf’s marketplace as the only product that provides real-time electronic scoring for individuals as well as golf clubs. The scope and timetable of required server side development and web-services were extremely challenging, so we knew we have to pick the right partner in order to reach our ambitious goals. Exove did not only succeed in execution, but they also acted as a true partner throughout the project.”

Mikko Rantanen, CEO of Free Drop Innovations, continues: “We set the standard for our web presence and on-line community very high as we knew that in international golf marketplace only the best products and services prevail. The end result speaks for itself and further distances GameBook from its competition. We are in particular extremely proud of our web-based community, the GameBook Clubhouse. It provides players opportunity to connect with one another through a sophisticated and innovative community platform.”

If you are a golfer, please check www.golfgamebook.com and register. The best game just got better.

World Design Capital 2012 site on Drupal

As many of you probably know, Helsinki has been appointed the World Design Capital 2012 a week ago in Singapore.

We had the pleasure of working with the World Design Capital project team, and the skillful designers of Kokoro & Moi to design and implement a Drupal based site for the World Design Capital 2012 Helsinki.

Drupal was a perfect fit for such a site. Please visit www.wdc2012helsinki.fi for further information about the project.

Taloussanomat palkinnoille

Pari kuukautta sitten mainitsemamme pohjoismaisen Society for Newsdesign Scandinavia -kilpailun palkinnot on jaettu ja Taloussanomat voitti pronssia ja kunniamaininnan.

Pronssia tuli sivuston etusivusta ja kunniamaininta koko verkkopalvelun suunnittelusta. Muita suomalaisia verkkojulkaisuja ei päässyt palkintosijoille ja kultaa ei jaettu tänä vuonna kenellekään.

Lue Taloussanomien artikkeli aiheesta ja tutustu kilpailun kaikkiin voittajiin. Taloussanomat on kieltämättä hienossa seurassa.

Taloussanomat ja Best of Scandinavian News Design

Grand One 2009:n finalistipaikan lisäksi Taloussanomien sivustouudistus on pärjännyt hyvin Society for News Design Scandinavian (SNDS) vuosittaisessa kilpailussa. Kilpailuun osallistutaan edellisen vuoden aikana tehdyillä lehti- ja sivustouudistuksilla.

Taloussanomien etusivu on päässyt mitalisijalle ja yleinen sivustouudistus on tuomariston mielestä kunniamaininnan arvoinen. Mitalin väri selviää toukokuun puolivälissä Oulu24-seminaarissa.

Kaikki palkitut lehdet ja sivustot on esitelty SNDS:n sivuilla. Taloussanomat on varsin vaikuttavassa seurassa.

Taloussanomien sivustouudistus Grand One -finaalissa

Grand One 2009:n finalistit ovat äskettäin tulleet julki ja voin rinta rottingilla kertoa, että Exoven suunnittelema ja toteuttama Taloussanomien sivustouudistus on päässyt finaaliin molemmissa sarjoissa, joihin sen ilmoitimme. B2C-palveluita oli ilmoitettu mukaan 47, joista kuusi pääsi jatkoon. Infodesign-sarjassa töitä oli vastaavasti ilmoitettu 32, joista kahdeksan pääsi jatkoon.

Markkinointi & Mainonta kehuu tämän vuoden satoa kovatasoiseksi. Erityisesti meitä lämmittää seuraava toteumus: “Töissä näkyy alan suunnittelijoiden kokemus. He tunnistavat mitä ongelmia ratkoa, ja löytävät siihen myös oikeat markkinoinnin ratkaisut.”

Tutustu tarkemmin Grand One 2009 -esittelysivuumme. Kaikki finalistit löytyvät Grand Onen sivuilta.