Doorking: Drupal Publishing for Security & Access Control
Doorking: Drupal Publishing for Security & Access Control
SUMMARY
Doorking’s rich catalog of access control and security solutions has been supported by Dogs of Design Studios for almost 2 decades. Facet has supported Dogs of Design in the development of multiple Drupal 7 sites for Doorking, streamlining development operations, providing technical architecture oversight, and optimizing page speed performance to support Doorking’s website traffic and SEO rankings.
Challenge
Doorking’s site has been through a number of redesigns over the years. Through each iteration, we needed to drive a cohesive user experience—making sure that content management is easy while content is easily discoverable. The information architecture needed to support the content strategy and reduce administrative overhead of managing multiple systems.
Insight
Doorking supports both commercial and consumer visitors on their site, with technical content such as installation guides and architecture specifications for architects and installers. Technical resources, while appropriate for the right audience, needed to be easily searchable in the tech support and product listing areas.
Solution
Drupal Best Practices
Facet has provided a Drupal 7 upstream distribution and operational framework for Doorking since the publishing platform’s creation. While Drupal offers a robust framework, opinionated best practices are what allows Doorking to benefit from streamlined security and maintenance operations. Over the past 10 years Doorking has gone through 3 overhauls of best practices, with the most recent meeting 2020’s Drupal 7 best practices.
Front-End Performance Tuning
When Doorking’s Drupal site was originally built, Facet used a popular jQuery plugin: Galleria. Since 2012, Galleria has fallen by the wayside, as have most of the front-end frameworks used during the site’s first theme development.
Over the years, Facet has implemented lazy loading with Blazy, consolidated external tracking pixels into Google Tag Manager, optimized custom fonts with Font Awesome and Google Fonts. The results have driven Doorking’s scores on Page Speed Insights over the hump each time Google has moved the target. Performance tuning Drupal is an ongoing battle that requires staying up to date with the most recent best practices. Fortunately Drupal’s community provides the majority of the collective work at our fingertips.
