i7San is an interactive community website promoted by Ahmad Al-Shugairi, a media person well known for his religion-themed TV program Khawater in Saudi Arabia. Ahmad is involved in contributing and generating interest towards various social causes. His earlier website, andalusiah.com, had become very popular in Saudi Arabia. Ahmad wanted to relaunch the website as i7san.net to be able to reach many more people in the Middle East region.
Ahmad had an earlier version of the website developed on Drupal 7 Dev version. However, the site had many core coding issues which led to huge performance challenges. The Srijan team was roped in to clean out the issues and take the site live in a few weeks. Srijan managed to meet the tight deadline.
But the website had many issues, and after a few months of trying to fix them, Srijan suggested that it would be better to start from scratch. Ahmad agreed.
The Solution
i7san.net (i7san) is a networking/community portal that invites users to create communities to enable contribution to social causes. i7san lets users clubs and projects around various social topics such as Education, Disaster Relief and so on. Users can create a mass movement for these topics and seek support which could be financial, physical or through donation of items.
i7san supports Arabic, a right to left language, as well as English, which is left to right. It also uses Apache Solr’s Faceted search to enable a faster and accurate search experience for its users. The site is integrated with various popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The user gets all notifications and updates for all these activities in one place.
In June 2012, the customer decided to develop a mobile app for the i7san site. Srijan’s development team brainstormed, conducted extensive research and delivered 80 APIs in a little over six weeks. Srijan figured out the future requirements and built the APIs that the website might need to integrate with some other application going forward.
Benefits
- A high-performance community website: Today, i7san has over 60,500 volunteers, 4000 clubs, 3300 projects to which over 8800 volunteering hours are being contributed. The site is delivering on the vision Ahmad had for the project.
- Drupal rescue: The customer had already spent thousands of dollars, yet the development work was not moving in the right direction, and the website was a mess. Srijan came aboard, started fixing the bugs and handled the development work.
- Developed APIs for mobile apps: Though the brief from the i7san team was to deliver 16 APIs, Srijan conducted extensive research and delivered over 80 APIs that the website could need going forward.
- Delivery beyond the brief: Srijan’s consultative functioning approach helped the client discover requirements accurately throughout the project and the unflinching support helped them resolve all challenges that they and their tech vendors faced.
