How we do it: Django-based portal mechanism for Polskie Wydawnictwo Rolnicze (PWR)

Ambitious client who knows what he wants

Polskie Wydawnictwo Rolnicze is the biggest publisher of agricultural materials in Poland. It’s the owner of such titles as “top agrar Polska” or “Tygodnik Poradnik Rolniczy”. The primary aim of the company is to combine the needs of farmers, providers of measures of agricultural production and scientific authorities in the field of up-to-date knowledge and exchanging good habits.

When we first met with the Client, his ideas about the project were crystalized:

1. to modernize websites of his biggest titles – sites had to be responsive, intuitive and coded up to current standards
2. one CMS for the management of all websites in order to minimize the work on the implementation of next titles
3. one user account per user for all websites

…but it doesn’t mean we know everything

While the basic requirements of the project were clear and unambiguous, all we had when it comes to details was just general information. The Client didn’t know the capabilities of modern web technologies and wasn’t aware of the actual trends when it comes to UX/UI. We decided that series of workshops will be the best solution. These workshops allowed us to present our ideas and conceptions about the project – we have been showing what can be done in order to satisfy potential users of websites – quite often in the form of almost-ready mockups. After several hours of meetings, hundreds of e-mails and calls exchanged, we could consider the stage of designing the specification closed. Every page of the website had its mockup ready in three versions: desktop, tablet and smartphone.

Three-field system – why not? Three columns and a header – no, thank you

During the workshops we spent long hours on perfecting the concept of the graphic design for Client’s websites. Thanks to analyzing the newest implementations of websites on the world, we already knew that the era of the homepage being the wall full of text links is coming to the end. The world of web design opted for the simple and readable format, the minimalistic approach of graphic design and large pictures as the eye-catching element of the content. This idea was brilliant. A few months after we finished the first stage of the project, similar redesign was implemented for such portals as Onet, WP or Interia.

Since we had the specification and mockups ready, we started working on graphic design. We prepared almost 50 graphic projects including several RWD views of key pages. That phase of work lasted almost 100 hours.

Best milk straight from the cow, best code from our devs

It took a while to figure out which solution will be more suitable to assumptions presented at the beginning by the Client. After listing pros and cons, we decided to use Django – Python’s framework.

The choice was made because of Django flexibility and efficiency (it’s way better than WordPress or Drupal in this case). This flexibility was really important to us due to two reasons. Firstly, we knew that uncommon features will be implemented (such as one user account, one administration panel for websites), and that we will have to integrate with external systems. The second issue is the awareness that the platform will be further developed with the new features introduced in the future while the old ones get modified. By choosing Django PWR avoided limitations or obstacles which would occur sooner or later in case of using the ready CMS.

The advantage in efficiency was also an important factor for choosing Django. Using the finished CMS was connected with the risk that the proper performance of many portals would require vast amount of server resources, thus generating significant costs.

In addition, Django is simple-to-use admin panel which can be easily adjusted to customers’ needs. Thanks to that the redaction has no problems managing it and the IT department spends less time supporting them.

Functionalities and statistics

Front-end development resulted in 46 HTML files, 32 CSS files nad 82 JS files. It was really important to us to ensure that templates are up to standards – the effect was we had 0 errors in the W3C validator.

Back-end work took 90 days of two developers’ coding. During that time our team prepared such functionalities as:

• the news base (with tags, comments and photo galleries),
• archive articles’ base (related to releases, releases’ management),
• the system for buying subscriptions and advertisements (managing subscriptions, updating the status of subscribers based on the data sent regularly from PWR, the integration with PayU),
• the integration with adserver (Revive was selected originally),
• the integration with Freshmail (the subscription on newsletter lists),
• discussion forum,
• rankings (based on regions and categories),
• movies gallery (with the division into categories, the possibility of attaching them to articles, user’s ratings),
• homepage configuration’s mechanism (every portal may have its layout and the number of elements modified).

Harvest isn't the end of the work - it's only the beginning…

Even during the implantation works new ideas and needs regarding the portal’s mechanism emerged. Our cooperation with the client resulted in the implementation – after the release of the first website – of new tools and functionalities. The most interesting among them are:

• statistics module – it allows the redaction the possibility to analyze readers’ preferences, most popular categories and keywords. Thanks to that PWR team can adjust their offer to match customers’ needs.
• photos galleries – thanks to them the redaction can present gigs, events and foreign trips in an attractive way.
• e-releases and online archive – it’s the answer for growing users’ needs who buy online versions of articles or magazines more and more. The new module gives the possibility of reading electronic e-releases and archived articles online thanks to the custom HTML5-based browser. It’s integrated with SMS payments.
• development of agricultural market’s listings – the new edition means more information: tables and charts presenting current prices, advanced price comparison search engine, micro-business stocks’ cards and maps showing these stocks.
• weather – another section created from scratch – it presents the weather forecast for farmers for dozens of cities and towns in Poland. Data is downloaded automatically from the external source.

Still grazing

A few months after we finished working on topagrar.pl PWR asked us for help in configuring its second website, Tygodnik Poradnik Rolniczy (Weekly Agricultural Guidance). In order to differentiate both websites, we introduced many little changes in the design and in the information grid on the homepage. Thanks to that, most of functionalities could be shared and the amount of work necessary for launching tygodnik-rolniczy.pl was minimal.

Only then we could consider that the whole project meets the requirements and provides real benefits to our Client.

The project for Polskie Wydawnictwo Rolnicze described above was one of the most complex projects which I was responsible for leading. Some uncommon requirements as well as the scale of the project were a challenge in particular. Thanks to the good selection of technologies (Django, HTML5 and Solr) we managed to fulfill all the needs set at the beginning. PWR received efficiently working portal mechanism which is simple in management and can be further developed. It allows to manage multiple modern, responsive websites.