X PRIZE Foundation Drupal Case Study

About X PRIZE
First X PRIZE
$10 Million Ansari X PRIZE announced in 1996 for first private team to build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth's surface, twice within two weeks.
Won by Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen on October 4, 2004.
Knowledge & Technology purchased by Richard Branson of Virgin America and now being used by Virgin Galactic to offer the public trips into space.
Current X PRIZES
Archon X PRIZE for Genomics - $10 Million to first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days
Google Lunar X PRIZE - $20 million Grand Prize will be awarded to the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth.
Progressive Automotive X PRIZE - $10 Million to first team to produce a 100MPG production capable automobile built with specific guidelines.

Drupal was chosen for the following reasons
Met all the requirements with regards to current and future planned functionality
Could be deployed against requirements in a quick timeframe with limited resources
Provided good performance using caching to handle traffic spikes X PRIZE was prone to
Provided a very flexible platform to customize using standard LAMP stack
Offered great extensibility in the form of modules
Offered a low cost of ownership which is important for a non-profit
Had a strong developer community with continuing support & upgrades

Here’s a high level breakdown of the 4 month deployment plan
Selection of new datacenter for hosting
Setup & configuration of new servers (1 Production, 1 MySQL, 1 Development)
Installation of Drupal
Creation of templates for migration of existing sites
Drupal configuration
Creation of content types, categories, & other core setup
Research, installation & configuration of all necessary modules
Migration of all content from existing sites to Drupal
Setup of user roles and access rights
Training users on use of Drupal to create content
Creation of new Google Lunar X PRIZE site, template, and content

Advanced Drupal Setup
The reasons we chose this templating method were:
Single admin UI to manage all sites
Avoided duplicating setup for each site
Single sign-on, registration & profile for users to interact on all sites
Single codebase leveraged across all sites
Ability to easily aggregate content to main foundation site using views

GLXP Site
GLXP Home
2 views on home page
Custom icon prefixes
Nav Functions code to link block titles out
My Menu using “nice menus” navigation module

Teams Functionality
Taxonomy Access Control
Core only provides global “Administer Nodes” access rights
Granular rights to creating / editing content types

phpBB module for Forum integration
Intercepts and uses drupal account info
Uses private message module
Profiles link to Drupal profiles

Other Notable Modules Used
Admin Menu
Brilliant Gallery / Lightbox 2
Pathauto
Service Links
Webform
Captcha / Math Captcha
Notify
TinyMCE
IMCE
Feed API (soon)

X PRIZE Foundation Drupal Case Study

by krynsky on Apr 29, 2008

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X PRIZE Foundation Drupal Case Study — Presentation Transcript