Digital Transformation for a Virtual Library

Solution for Digital Transformation

When using a CMS, like Drupal or WordPress, to serve personalized content, you can expect performance issues. The main reason for this is the caching limitation, which means that for each user, the server creates a new content experience. With many concurrent requests, bottlenecks occur while accessing databases and other resources.  

We based the solution on supercharging Drupal with Reindex: 

• Drupal to manage the content and the editor experience with layout builder 
• React components with the abstraction layer payer of Reindex which is based on GraphQL 
• Elastic as the search engine. 
• Drupal as the content management system since it is highly reputable as a secured framework, for any enterprise. 

This combination, a Drupal and REINDEX’s hybrid architecture with React components, provided a personal experience, search, and filtering capabilities while contributing to superior performance. 

The search engine is Elastic. We enhanced the filters with hierarchy search-based filters and auto-complete. 

We also used Elastic to index the data and implement a search and filter query engine to support fast response searching, auto-complete and nested filtering.  

React components are integrated into Drupal through a Reindex-Drupal module.

We used Drupal 8/9 as the CMS with a layout builder, giving superpowers to the editors to build new dashboards and pages. Editors can create enhanced experiences for their users by themselves, without the help of IT. This improved the process, making it faster and less expensive, cutting out any additional IT costs.  

We based the solution on the Reindex platform, a fully open source and microservices architecture, empowering the CMS. 

Since Reindex is already integrated with Drupal through a module that enables us to integrate React components, we created several components that the editor can add, configure and use in a layout builder. This gave the editor full independence to create complex dashboards in two minutes or less. 

The performance was excellent since the components retrieved the data from a virtual API, provided by Elastic, rather than CMS. This also let us provide excellent filtering and search capabilities. 

To encourage the users to consume more content, we added a personalization layer.

• The user could select the interesting categories, lessons, and lectures. 
• From the other side, the institute was able to provide the right content to the right user and communicate with the user on a consistent basis; informing them of new classes, updates on the site, and promotions. Think Netflix, but for an academic institution. 

Netflix’s model of promoting content to their users based on profile encourages the user to consume more content. In our solution, this was done with the rules engines, a configurable robot that can be triggered from generated insights. The editor defines rules to communicate with the users. For example, the system updates each user separately when there is new information added that would likely be of interest to the user.  To increase the level of personalization, we tapped into AI-based personalized content suggestions. 

The solution also simplified the editor’s experience. Using the solution, the editor can design and develop unique pages, lobbies, category pages with no hand-coding, in addition to the extensive library of components. The editor can create additional templates and adapt to existing patterns without other skills. 

The last step of this digital transformation was  moving the content along and into the user’s inbox, we added a Mail-Adapted Robot Engine to communicate with the user for constant engagement. The mailings update the user when new content and relevant information are added. 

Benefits to Digital Transformation

The more engaged the reader is the more potential for forging deeper relationships with the institution. This can lead to greater involvement from alumni, higher donations from listeners, and sponsorship opportunities.

With a zero-code editor experience, the editor has a lot less on their plate, resulting in lower operational costs for the institution.