Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Other organisations involved included ABC and Massive Interactive.
Established in 1995, Unearthed is a project of Australian radio station triple j, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It’s one of the biggest music talent competitions in the world, and has kickstarted the careers of bands and artists like Missy Higgins, Grinspoon, and Sophie Koh.
Unearthed has been around since the days of bands sending in their CDs, but it has evolved with the times: the site now gives bands the ability to upload tracks, share their music, and promote their gigs. The website now has over 99,000 tracks to stream, and an always-on digital radio station that curates playlists from the uploaded music.
The bands that upload songs also have the opportunity to win competitions that can launch them into higher stardom, with prizes including the chance to play at major music festivals, or win the chance to work with industry professionals on recording sessions, workshops or film clips.
As a long running website, triple J Unearthed has been through a series of custom website builds and wanted to consolidate onto an open source platform that could continue to grow with their needs and their evolving user base. The site was also to be accompanied by companion iOS and Android apps that allow users to play, download, share tracks and add tracks to playlists.
About the project
This Little Duck were engaged after the initial site build to audit the new Unearthed Drupal site for build progress, code quality, migration and deployment. We recommended several large improvements including deployment, migration, code structure and performance best practises.
These recommendations were enthusiatically approved, and we were brought on to implement the suggested changes.
This involved tasks such as:
Deployment
We ensured a stress-free move from the sites hosting with internal MS servers to Acquia hosting.
Examining Process
Based on the auditing suggestions, we moved the code base and deployment process into a more well-defined system. We created a new system based upon best-practice of separation of functionality and content, and included a process for testing and QA, that would also allow for easy rollbacks.
Optimisation
We optimised Javascript code across the side, and moved search functionality to be based on Apache Solr, for better functions and increased speed.
Why Drupal was chosen
The ABC recognised Drupal as an expandable, open source solution that is ideally suited for integrating data—from playlists and songs and more—into a cohesive whole. Drupal was also recognised as a solid and scalable solution that could cope with triple j Unearthed’s high traffic and bandwidth requirements. The multiplatform advantages of Drupal were also an important factor with the content store and services api allowing problem-free publishing to other platforms, such as the companion mobile apps.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The triple j Unearthed website involves a lot of content moderation and management and thus the combination of workflow and views bulk operation allowed for an effective blend of flexibility and finesse.
Panels, views, boxes and masonry provided the ability to create flexible layouts that can easily be changed by the editorial team and presented a free flowing layout that changes dynamically with screen resizing.
The triple j unearthed website relies on processing several feeds of information sourced from specialised media and playlist services. Services combined with Apache Solr helped filter and process these feeds into meaningful content for end users. The same methods also helped provide content to iOS and Android apps.
The triple j Unearthed site receives a large amount of regular traffic, so ensuring the site runs smoothly and scales well is essential. In addition to Drupal’s caching, memcache was utilised alongside Acquia’s high performance hosting to get the maximum possible performance. Many processing tasks need to happen regularly to update track listings and media assets and it was important to ensure that these tasks did not create a bottleneck for site visitors. To help with this, the Elysia cron, batch and queue modules allowed for more precise setting of when these tasks should complete along with breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks.
