Developing Social Network for Cooking Lovers

The Client

Our client is a host of an online cooking social network that continuously brings to our lives a variety of food recipes and food culture. Each day it provides a set of most delicious recipes that can be cooked at home. Everyone is free to try and share their opinion, photos, etc.

The Scope

To provide such entertaining experience for people, our client aimed to create a web portal that would showcase culinary recipes in a very appealing user-friendly way, and going forward, would give people freedom to discuss, share and add their own recipes with others in the community.

The Challenge

Web portal required to provide a comprehensive list of easy-to-understand and use features while focus on growing the community around itself.

The client had a very short timeline for implementing the project and tiny amount of requirements documentation.

The Solution

Based on analysis of our client’s goals and project specifics, we recommended to use Drupal CMS as a backbone for web portal.

The criteria met were

• Drupal CMS is a free open-source yet powerful framework that can reduce project timeline and budget by 5 times
• Drupal CMS has a huge collection of various add-ons and modules that can be used as is or with minimum customization
• By using Drupal CMS framework we reduced size of development team and saved additional budget

Drupal is a flexible PHP-based CMS system with many modules for advanced search functionalities, user profiles, blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls, caching and feature throttling for improved performance under load, multi-level menu system, multi-user content creation and editing, RSS Feed and Feed aggregation, security/new release update notification, access control restrictions (by IP addresses, e-mail, etc), and workflow tools (Triggers and Actions).

A significant plus of Drupal open source realization is that the standard or third-party modules can be fine-tuned or even significantly modified to better reflect customers requirements. For this project, two modules were extensively modified (Favorite Notes and Hierarchical Select), and one core module (Recipe Diva Module) had to be written from scratch. To do this we had to scrutinize Drupal API, even learning undocumented features.

Technologies

PHP, Drupal, Symfony 2, MySQL DHTML (JavaScript, CSS, HTML)

The Outcome

The customer got a completely functional, robust, stable website in very limited time and within the budget. Azoft specialists got additional experience in use of Drupal for web development and are now ready to work with projects of any complexity.