Developing an Advanced EdTech Platform on Drupal for a Leading US Education Company, Resulting in Six-Figure Profits

Even before the rise of online classes and the impact of COVID-19, the education company, well-known globally and headquartered in New York, aimed to digitize its supplementary materials. They had an existing platform built in AEM that allowed teachers to buy supplements but didn't enable online use. Our job was to upgrade the platform, allowing teachers to purchase and use their accessories online.
The project was supposed to offer teachers monthly subscriptions to access content created by a team of editors. Each monthly release included a main story accompanied by quizzes, videos, and audio – all designed to engage and entertain students. Teachers also had the option to save their preferred stories to their personal pages for later use in their teaching. Project Overview:

• Location: USA
• Product: Website
• Scope of our work: Back-end, Front-end
• Technologies: Drupal 7, PHP, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Varnish, Apache Solr, Acquia
• Team: Back-end Developer, Front-end Developer
• Timeline: Ongoing since 2017

Regrettably, we cannot disclose the application's name, any app screenshots, and links to the product due to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

We opted for Drupal as the solution believed to save the company's budget and enable teachers to use their supplements online while generating more revenue. Drupal, a content management system (CMS), addresses many technical aspects that need resolving before product development begins. These include handling different user roles and permissions, content creation and management, distribution and integration, advanced visualization, and integrating day-to-day services like email and payments. Most of these elements come ready to use in Drupal, with minimal customization needed for only a few tasks, depending on your desired level of customization. All of the above factors contribute to why Drupal can help save budget while remaining one of the best solutions available.
We built the mentioned features – a platform with an admin panel for editors and stories as well as a subscription and newsletters for teachers – based on designs from the ground up, following the company’s guidance. We primarily used Drupal 7, along with third-party subscription and newsletter distribution services. The project is hosted in the Acquia cloud infrastructure and is maintained by us using a continuous integration approach.
The edit mode view could sometimes confuse editors, leading to increased time spent on each piece of content. That's why, in addition to developing the platform, we decided to introduce a new content management tool. Since the company's business model mainly revolved around providing online content to teachers, our team created advanced content creation forms inspired by the user-friendly features of WordPress and AEM, two CMSs the company was familiar with. These new forms simplified content creation and distribution while offering helpful tips to editors. We also streamlined the process of working with images and videos by leveraging this tool, making it incredibly easy for editors to post and edit multimedia elements. This solution combined the benefits of an existing Drupal solution with a high level of customization we achieved by integrating them, ultimately enhancing efficiency and user-friendliness.

• The project was completed on schedule, following a successful launch, and swiftly emerged as the most popular and profit-generating website within the company’s brand portfolio, boasting over 1 million users.
• In the first year after rebuilding the platform, the company's net profit reached a six-figure amount in US dollars, and it was able to attract more teachers and institutions worldwide.
• The team's intended support for the website decreased by 20%, resulting in reduced costs, as the solution required fewer developers for future maintenance.
• We improved the edit mode view by tailoring the Drupal admin panel to our needs. We retained only the essential fields on each page and thoughtfully incorporated tooltips and hints to assist editors on editorial pages.