This document discusses Zagat.com's migration from a legacy ASP.NET website to Drupal. It outlines problems with the old site such as being difficult to update and test. Solutions included using Drupal and related modules, optimizing front-end performance, automating deployments, and adding tools like Varnish, Jenkins, and Selenium. Non-Drupal talent was brought in to help with tasks like testing. Analytics and user testing were used to track goals and iterate quickly.

2. ZAGAT.COM CASE STUDY

4. WHO ARE WE?
Steven Merrill
Director of Engineering, Phase2 Technology
@stevenmerrill
Brian McMurray
Developer, Phase2 Technology
@bmcmurray

5. , the quick history
Founded in 1979 by Tim and Nina Zagat
User-Generated Content before “User-
Generated Content”
“The Gastronomic Bible”
- The Wall Street Journal
We worked with Zagat from June 2010 -
November 2011

6. THE PROBLEM(S)
Legacy ASP.NET website rapidly aging
Updates difficult
Complicated QA testing and deployment
process
Desire for website to be more social
Separated systems (website, blog, webstore)

7. THE SOLUTIONS
Fight for the Users
Drupal and Friends
Robots for Better Living
It’s Dangerous To Go Alone! Take This!
Eye on the Prize
Hindsight is 20/20

8. FIGHT FOR THE USERS
Iterate quickly and test the ideas with real users
Track goals and analytics

9. USER TESTING
Formal in-person interviews with functional
prototype
On-going user testing through usertesting.com
service
Users could be granted special permission
(roles) to access beta features

10. USER TESTING (VIDEO)
00:01 -00:34

11. TRACK GOALS AND ANALYTICS
Google Analytics –
http://dgo.to/google_analytics
CrazyEgg analytics – http://crazyegg.com
Google Website Optimizer for multi-variate
testing
Links with anchor names (# tags) to track in-site
referrals

12. DRUPAL AND FRIENDS
Use complimentary technologies to augment
Contrib for the 80%, Custom for the 100%

13. DYNAMIC CHARTING
RaphaëlJS –
http://raphaeljs.com
Browser Compatibility
Mobile phone
compatibility

14. THE ZAGAT MATRIX

15. THE ZAGAT MATRIX

16. PERFORMANCE MATTERS
Varnish – http://varnish-cache.org
Front-end Performance

17. VARNISH
HTTP Caching
Caching Fragments (ESI)

18. FRONT-END PERFORMANCE
Spriting
“Spooning”
<img src="spacer.gif"
data-src="actual-
image.jpg" />
Page Weight Trimming
AJAX upgrades
OpenLayers build scripts
Monitoring
HARViewer -
http://www.softwareishard.com/har/viewer/
ShowSlow - http://www.showslow.com/

19. FRONT-END PERFORMANCE TUNING
Run daily front-end performance tests against a
number of competitors and keep metrics

20. FRONT-END PERFORMANCE TUNING

21. CONTRIB SUCCESS STORIES
Social Badges
Flag –
http://dgo.to/flag
Rules –
http://dgo.to/rules
Zagat “Buzz” Blog
Maps
Shop

22. CONTRIB: ZAGAT "BUZZ" BLOG
Migrate – http://dgo.to/migrate
Views – http://dgo.to/views

23. CONTRIB: MAPS
OpenLayers – http://dgo.to/openlayers

24. CONTRIB: SHOP
Übercart – http://dgo.to/ubercart

25. GOING CUSTOM
Search
Paid Online Subscriptions

26. SEARCH
Needed to integrate with specific Endeca setup
AJAX refreshing of results
Integration with subscription upselling
Multiple search interfaces
Custom autocomplete

27. PAID ONLINE SUBSCRIPTIONS
Integrate with specific payment handler and
Zagat backend
Many discrete data points:
Promo codes
Subscription offers
Bundles
Partner promotions

28. CONTRIB IN CUSTOM CODE
Subscription offers used CTools Export UI

29. ROBOTS FOR BETTER LIVING
Automate deployments
Performance monitoring
Regression testing

30. JENKINS
Automated data imports
Automatic deployment
Run SimpleTests before each
deploy
Empowering QA people to push
and do deploys
TortoiseHg on a Windows
server
Cron, with historical reporting
Run daily tasks to sync between systems

31. MONITORING TOOLS
Real-time Stats
Pingdom
GTMetrix

32. REAL-TIME STATS
CoRadiant Appliance
Zeus Load Balancer

33. PINGDOM
Uptime
Backend response times

34. GTMETRIX
Front-end performance testing
Daily snapshot and performance over time
Can send custom cookies or use HTTP
authentication

35. SELENIUM
http://seleniumhq.org
Automated regression testing
Run on the QA environment
ARIA-compliant autocomplete
(by upgrading jQuery and jQuery
UI) meant we could test with Selenium

36. IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE!
TAKE THIS!
Your Drupal site needs more than just Drupalers
Tips on adding team members

37. BRINGING IN NON-DRUPAL TALENT
Look for folks:
Who are familiar with contributing to open-
source
Interested in learning new things
Examples
Junior developer with a Linux / CS
background who ended up contributing to a
large amount of Drupal development
Experienced contributor to a Linux distribution
with no web programming background who
came in and helped write complex Selenium
tests and automate web QA
Later went on to assume the majority of the
sysops responsibilities

38. EYE ON THE PRIZE
All software has bugs
Product owners with deep experience will notice
bugs that users won’t
Some features were gone, and users let us know

39. HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
Config Management
Virtualized LAMP environments

40. CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
Six hosting environments