TheSchoolRun

The challenge

For many of those 15 years, the site was running on Drupal 7. A major upgrade was going to be needed to move to Drupal 8. With the web site very feature rich and continual logging in and data changes possible from registered users, this would prove to be one of the largest and complex upgrades we had ever taken on. So much so that by the time all the planning and research had been completed, Drupal 9 was released and we upgraded to that instead. Of course, since then the site has been upgraded again to Drupal 10-all major version upgrades of Drupal after version 8 being relatively trivial. More on upgrading from Drupal 7 in one of our blog posts.

The strategy

Revenue is obtained primarily from paid subscribers who wish to access resources such as work sheets and tutorials, but in addition there is an online shop to purchase digital downloads and also third party advertising. Customers are encouraged to register to access free resources, then to subscribe to gain unlimited access.

The website makes use of Drupal’s strengths in many areas, in particular the permission structure and private file system. However, in some cases integration with web services has made it possible to provide a richer and more refined experience for both site visitors and administrators. Subscriptions are performed using the Zoho Subscriptions service and regular mail outs are handled with Adestra. Both of these features integrate using those service's API’s.

Features built within Drupal by Logic+Magic include a “My resources”section. This allows articles and worksheets to be saved into a logged in user's account. These can then be assigned to children of the account holder and items can be completed. It is also possible to add an entire learning journey with multiple resources within it, making it possible to record progression.

The digital download section of the site makes use of the Drupal Commerce module, though unlike most e-commerce web sites, the shop is not one of the main features of TheSchoolRun.