Optimising Underperforming Functionality & Security Issues On Drupal 7

Connell Guides creates accessible guide books that help students of different ages better understand great novels, poems and plays on the main English syllabuses better. The CG (Connell Guides) subscription service provides access to e-book guides, literary briefings and videos of text discussions, produced by CG itself. Over time Connell Guides asked us to help improve the website several times. CG website was initially built by another team using Drupal 7. Security and UI issues were left without attention, also with time business development purposes requested changes on the website.

The original website was built using Drupal Commerce and the main purpose was to sell guide books created by CG. It was privately funded and built badly: the main issue was underperforming functionality which was the first task. It was a huge blocker for business development.

After a while CG added a subscription service (image below) for students so that they would not need to order printed guide books and could access other helpful content created by CG. However, they were experiencing security issues, and faced a huge amount of spam registration accounts and XSS attacks that were badly affecting the business that occurred to be the second task.

Within a short period of time we carried out a successful refactoring that allowed CG to develop their business. We started by updating the backend of the website to the latest Drupal version available to solve security issues. To eliminate spam we have simply added Captcha, and detected and corrected an error related to XSS attacks. As a result of these changes, a smooth subscription management process was established which helped CG to continue to expand their business.

To make the website supportable, secure and good-looking we implemented a number of changes:

• Migrated the website to a new domain

• Configured Google Analytics

• Updated Drupal core and modules

• Configured roles and permissions for the subscription service

• Updated website’s design

We used the following technologies to bring the changes: Drupal 7, HTML, Javascript, CSS, GIT(Bitbucket) and AWS.

We were able to implement all these changes within smaller budget and still improve website’s overall quality in a major way. All these changes helped the business to achieve its goals and continue to deliver their great products to students.