Foreign Affairs case study

Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

This session will explore how the new Foreign Affairs Web site, which was developed by Palantir.net and launched in March 2009, showcases Drupal’s wide variety of capabilities. In addition to leveraging existing modules, the site features a significant amount of new functionality developed for the site and contributed back to the Drupal community.

Material covered in this presentation will include:

• Developing a custom import system that processed 60 years worth of existing content for integration into the new site.
• Making that content easy to navigate so that users can find articles, essays, and book reviews by a variety of categories, including date, region, topic, and author.
• Seamlessly integrating 150,000 subscribers from several different authentication sources into the new site.
• Developing a tiered access scheme that enables Foreign Affairs' paid-content model while still providing free access to their latest content.
• An IP address-based access system that allows users from institutions with existing site licenses to access premium content without having to log into the site.
• E-commerce gateway integration that allows visitors to purchase PDF reprints of past articles, subscribe or renew a subscription to the print edition, and manage their own account information online -- all within Drupal.
• Integration with multiple analytics and advertising systems as well as Google Search Appliance.
• A Drupal deployment framework that allows data to be securely and reliably transmitted between development, staging, and production servers. This includes content (nodes, taxonomy, users, etc) as well as configuration (views, content types, system settings, etc.).