Mid to late January, Popular Science's site will re launch with a new look and feel running on Drupal. pingVision has been quietly working on the project over the last couple of months. Implementation of this site brought us to use a hybrid version of the agile method of development.

There was a desire to import all content from the old set of sites. The current configuration has content being entered into the Vignette 7 CMS and being entered onto Typepad. V7 is Oracle based, so it first needed to be exported to MySQL. V7's data structure is a bit of a challenge to decode, but it was eventually worked out. Typepad only exports an HTML dump--but fortunately there is a module that the team was able to use to significantly speed up the process.

The team started the process by creating user stories for each and every section in the requirements document. This gave us a trail to follow to ensure nothing was forgotten in the development process. Secondly, the team needed to translate those sections into agile-friendly stories. Each of the stories was assigned tasks which were handed out to various developers. As the stories were generated, the folks at Popular Science provided wire frames. These were annotated on a white board and then transferred from photos we took of each white board into pdfs generated in Inkscape which were then transferred to our development environment using SVN. The annotations matched story and task numbers for cross referencing back to our project plan. They contained questions for the client as well.

Development started based on the wireframes with the expectation that the final comps would be strongly reflective of the wireframes. As development unfolded, additional final comps arrived and were integrated into the work flow.

The site also involved multiple integration points with third parties.

There was the requirement that the site administrators needed to have extreme flexibility in the placement of inset links lists, video, and images. To this end, the Drupal Markup Engine was created. It provides an extensible markup system for text, allowing administrators to decorate articles with images, video, and related information blocks, as well as any other markup they want to create.

The popsci folks also wanted a carousel of images at the bottom of the page, carouselling video offerings, and galleries. So Nodecarousel was created to fit those needs.

Communication with the Popular Science team was maintained through regular phone calls and through AIM. This gave the pingVision team access to the team in New York City almost 100% of the time. A quick question that did not necessarily warrant a phone call could be handled extremely quickly.

Congratulations to our friends at Popular Science, especially to Megan Miller and John Mahoney (at Popular Science) on a brand new site. We can't wait to finish the deployment!