Another brilliant turn out of 17 Drupalisters for our fourth monthly Drupal Yorkshire Meetup in Leeds, on April 16th. Orange Digital generously hosted and provided refreshments including beer and pizza.
After a welcome and introduction from Paul Driver and Pete McClory, Chris Johnson from Orange Digital presented their use of Drupal on enterprise-level sites, with a specific focus on the launch of EE in October 2012.
Chris spoke about the design, architecture and challenges facing the ambitious project.
EE chose to build the site on Drupal for a range of reasons including:
* PHP-based
* The availability of a pool of experienced Drupal developers
* Development time fitting with the tight 11 month schedule
Orange Digital worked with a range of agencies to deliver the Explore, Shop, Help, Business and Stores sections of the EE website.
Amazon EC2 cloud was used for the infrastructure and Chris went into detail about the stack and discussed:
* Used Percona rather than SQL
* Caching within the stack was important to improve performance, use of contributed memcache and Amazon S3 modules.
* Custom CSS and JS aggregation
* Security features
A large proportion of traffic - 60% and growing, is from mobile. The website has Responsive design as well as responsive content, which content editors are delighted with, as they only need to change content once.
The site was designed using a style guide using the Zen 5 framework and following the presentation Chris took questions from the floor.
Andrew and Tony spoke about the steering group for the new Drupal England and Wales association. Discussions have been taking place about the legal entity, membership and structure of the organisation. The next online seminar is scheduled for Thursday 25th April with a meeting also planned at the London sprint on the weekend of 27th to 28th April.
Tony from Orange Punch Creations presented the first 'My Favourite Module' mini-segment on his choice - Views Fluid Grid. Tony has written a quick introduction to the module in this short drupal tutorial on the Orange Punch website.
Later on the meetup moved to The Palace pub in Leeds, where inspiring discussions continued on Drupal, Open Source, Responsive theming and the possibility of broadcasting future meetups online.
Our next Drupal Yorkshire meetup is on May 14th in Leeds (venue TBC). If you are interested in attending, please register for your free ticket through Eventbrite (you can also access registration on our homepage). Also, follow us on Twitter to keep up with speakers announcements and info about upcoming Drupal Yorkshire events.