Public Radio International (PRI) is a global non-profit media company focused on the intersection of journalism and engagement to effect positive change in people’s lives. PRI’s mission is to serve audiences as a distinctive content source for information, insights and cultural experiences essential to living in our diverse, interconnected world.

Over the past few months, Four Kitchens has worked together with the PRI team to build a robust API in PRI’s Drupal 7 site, and a modern, fresh frontend that consumes that API. This project’s goal was to launch a new homepage in the new frontend. PRI intends to re-build their entire frontend in this new structure and Four Kitchens has laid the groundwork for this endeavor. The site went live successfully, with a noticeable improvement in load time and performance. The overall load time performance increased by 40% with first-byte time down to less than 0.5 seconds. The results of the PRI team’s efforts can be viewed at https://www.pri.org.

The overall load time performance increased by 40% with first-byte time down to less than 0.5 seconds.

Four Kitchens and PRI approached this project with two technical goals. The first was to design and build a full-featured REST API in PRI’s existing Drupal 7 application. We used RESTFul, a Drupal module for building APIs, to create a JSON-API compliant API.

Our second technical goal was to create a robust frontend backed by the new API. To achieve that goal, we used React to create component-based user interfaces and styled them with using the CSS Modules pattern. This work was done in a library of components in which we used Storybook to demonstrate and test the components. We then pulled these components into a Next-based application, which communicates with the API, parses incoming data, and uses that data to populate component properties and generate full pages. Both the component library and the Next-based application used Jest and Enzyme heavily to create thorough, robust tests.

A round of well-deserved kudos to the PRI team: Technical Project Manager, Suzie Nieman managed this project from start to finish, facilitating estimations that led the team to success. Senior JavaScript Engineer, Patrick Coffey, provided keen technical leadership as well as deep architectural knowledge to all facets of the project, keeping the team unblocked and motivated. Engineer, James todd brought his Drupal and JavaScript expertise to the table, architecting and building major portions of PRI’s new API. Senior Frontend Engineer, Evan Willhite, brought his wealth of frontend knowledge to build a robust collection of elegant components in React and JavaScript. Architect, David Diers created mechanisms that will be responsible for managing PRI’s API documentation that can be used in future projects.

Special thanks to Patrick Coffey and Suzie Nieman for their contributions to this launch announcement. 

The post Launch Announcement: PRI.org appeared first on Four Kitchens.