Scholastic Storyworks Jr. Website Share: .wrk Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 20 November 2019 Reading Time 3-Minute Read We’ve been working with Scholastic – a world leader in bringing the highest quality educational materials to children since 2013. Overview We are proud to say that we have been working with Scholastic — an undisputed world leader in bringing books and educational materials of the highest quality to children and teachers since 2013, adjusting our team to their needs and now we are a part of the core team. We have had a chance to work on multiple Scholastic projects but the one that we are proudest of is definitely Storyworks Jr. Storyworks Jr. is a powerful language-arts resource. It is produced by the same award-winning team that has created Storyworks for more than 20 years, the English Language Acquisition (ELA) resource. Situation A project of building Storyworks Jr website has been in work for a long time. First designs had arrived approximately 1 month before the development started. Once the final design was approved, our team was set a strict deadline for building the website – it was very important for the business to coordinate the launch with the start of the school date. Task The website should have provided teachers with subscription access to various content created by a group of editors on a monthly basis (monthly issue). The main content piece is a story with the addition of quizzes, video and audio – fun and involving student activities per each story. Teachers should be able to save chosen stories to their personalized pages to then use them in their work. Action We have implemented the aforementioned functionality and designs provided by Scholastic from scratch. Our main technology of choice was Drupal 7 accompanied by 3rd party subscription and newsletter distribution services. The project is located in the cloud infrastructure of Acquia and is supplied by us in the continuous integration model, based on Jenkins that includes automatic catching of new release branch creation with subsequent switching to this branch and running all update/migration scripts. Result The project was completed on time. After a successful launch, Storyworks Jr. has quickly become the most popular and well-monetized of Scholastic websites with more than 1 million users. Case studies #1 Problem Edit mode view was sometimes confusing for editors, which had resulted in more time being spent on each piece of content. Solution & Result We have optimized the edit mode view by customizing Drupal admin panel: only necessary fields were left on each page tooltips and hints were added to the fields left on editorial pages These changes made editors’ work simpler and less time-consuming. #2 Problem Editors had to validate each other’s content and customize images and video manually, which had resulted in submitting bad quality content Solution & Result We have implemented services that would do part of this work automatically: Kraken image optimizer with pre-set image sizes content validation feature in WYSIWYG editor video decoder All of this and helped to improve content quality and avoid the need of hot-fixes on the live site.