Daffodil enables Pajhwok News to develop a robust CMS and provide a seamless news experience to 200,000 viewers per day

Upon analyzing Pajhwok’s business requirements, our business analysts suggested Drupal to be the best fit to fulfill their technological objectives. Team Daffodil built the website using Drupal versions 6 and 7 and integrated various additional modules and themes. The Apache Solr Search Integration module was used to replace the core Drupal search for better performance. The APC user cache was used as a key module to enhance PHP code caching on the server as its goal is to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.

Daffodil built an application framework that was integrated with the video streaming functionality of Pajhwok’s news website. Technologies such as caching, Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABS), etc. were incorporated to automatically shift bandwidth to higher/lower levels according to the users’ bandwidth availability, and network conditions in real-time. We also enabled low latency streaming capabilities and zero buffering using less streaming resources to deliver an optimized and seamless video streaming experience for all the uses of Pajhwok’s video module. The HTTP video streaming protocols were followed to build the platform. Thus the platform became scalable, resilient, and provided a superior user experience.

Pajhwok wanted to provide access to all the latest news to paid subscribers and hence the Ubercart module was integrated into the platform. With the help of the module, users could purchase the subscription for a day, month, or year at respective prices. We also implemented PayPal payment Gateway to charge users for their subscription. We wanted to eliminate the need for users to purchase the subscription again and again whenever it expires. Hence, UC recurring payments and subscription modules were used to charge subscribers recurrently when their subscription ends to allow uninterrupted access to news stories. Session limit mechanism was used to ensure that a single account could not be shared by multiple users at the same time.

In order to reduce load on the primary website, we decided to create a separate subdomain that was maintained to handle news archives. In order to eliminate the need to manually copy the contents on the archive domain, we used the deployment module to deploy news articles from the main site to the archive server on a daily basis.

A few additional features and modules that were integrated into the website were:

Internationalization: An internationalization module was integrated into the website to enable language translation and allow editors to add different language versions for each news article. The website had content in three languages i.e. English, Dari, and Pashto. 

Node queue: This feature module was used to customize the order of news articles and videos displayed on the website. This provided the editors with the flexibility to choose the content they want to display on the homepage. Three different Node Queues were maintained for the three languages that the website operated in.

Views: This Views exposed filters module enabled the categorization of the news articles, pictures, and videos in multiple formats on the website. The content could be categorized in any manner such as based on time, popularity, etc. to help the user access the required news piece easily. 

Social Media Integration: This feature helped users share news articles, photos, and videos on their social media platforms directly through the Pajhwok website. Drupal’s inbuilt social media tool helps to integrate the company’s social accounts too with the website.