Last November, Weather.com launched on Drupal and became one of the highest trafficked websites in the world to launch on an open-source content management system (CMS). Today, we're proud to announce that we have been recognized with a 2015 Partner Site of the Year Award from Acquia for our work on Weather.com. The award recognizes outstanding visual design, functionality, integration and overall customer experience for a media website.
This year’s winners exemplify what can be done with great technology, beautiful design, and a customer-first mindset...Ultimately, it came down to a hair-splitting exercise to determine which sites serve their audience’s needs in the most effective, seamless way possible.
-Scott Liewehr, CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Clarity Group
The Weather Channel's Journey to Drupal
The Weather Channel (TWC) teamed up with Mediacurrent in 2012 to begin the process of a full migration from their previous content management system to Drupal.
By taking the time to understand the requirements and the impact of every decision, Mediacurrent planned a resilient architecture, allowing both parties to quickly respond to changing business needs without major disruptions. Our goals were to help TWC adopt an open-source solution and ensure that the new website also had drastically improved page load times and reduced infrastructure requirements.
Mediacurrent's team rose to the challenge, creating 30 completely custom modules, 120+ custom features and custom code on the final web platform. In a recent blog series, Senior Drupal DeveloperMatt Davis detailed Mediacurrent's approach to architecting a custom "presentation framework" for TWC and shared how we increased content portability, improved page load times, and created flexible widgets across multiple devices.
The Results
Weather.com now serves millions of pages to more than 100 million people each month. Weather’s move to Drupal shows how complex, content-rich sites benefit from an open, agile platform to deliver an amazing experience for every site visitor.
-Dries Buytaert, Acquia CTO and Drupal project creator
- Increased feature velocity and scalability to support 100M unique visitors monthly
- Streamlined editorial process by 175%
- Improved cache efficiency from 50% pre-launch to 96.3% post-launch, with an increase to 99.6% 3 weeks post-launch
For a complete case study, you can read more about Mediacurrent's work on Weather.com here or at Drupal.org.
Resources
Q&A With Weather.com | Video
Migrating the Weather Channel to Drupal | Webinar
Weather.com: A Novel Presentation Framework | Drupalcon 2015 Presentation Recording
