How TravAlliancemedia developed into a feature-rich and user-friendly platform
TravAlliancemedia caters to travel agents with their platform, Agent Studio. With this website builder, travel agents can create their own travel agency website in just a minute, as well as manage communication with their customers thanks to its built-in CRM tool. They integrated our user-friendly rich-text editor and file manager to provide their users with a smoother writing and content management experience.
Challenge: Finding a great file manager
Agent Studio was using a much older version of CKEditor for its rich-text editing capabilities. As with many CKEditor implementations, it did not need a lot of maintenance once installed.
The media and files in Agent Studio were stored in local user folders, but for thousands of websites,images and other media like PDFs, this was not the optimal solution. As a result, they have decided to migrate to Amazon S3.
After they decided to move all of their content from CDN, TravAlliancemedia needed to find a solution that could provide file and image management as well as compatibility with Amazon S3. Their existing CKFinder implementation did not allow this, and while investigating they realized both CKEditor and CKFinder had not been updated in a very long time.
Solution: Don’t change what’s great
One solution seemed obvious: upgrade to the newer versions of CKEditor and CKFinder that covered everything they needed. TravAlliancemedia Lead Developer Andrew Regis says “I’ve been using CKEditor for different jobs for many years, so when we started on this project, it was an easy choice: we just moved to the latest and greatest.”
They found the upgrade process pretty easy, but they needed something a little bit more special than the standard implementation. They needed not only to connect S3, but also to connect each website with a specific folder in the S3 bucket. TravAlliancemedia reached out to our support and together, we worked to create a custom S3 connector to the server. In under two days, TravAlliance’s custom implementation was ready to go to production.
As a developer, I really appreciate the API and the enrichment it provides. And the phenomenal documentation!
Even though Amazon S3 was what initiated the upgrade. They wanted to add as many bells and whistles as possible to improve their editor further.
Result: More features, fewer questions
Because TravAlliancemedia wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to design their content pages, they made many plugins available. They make frequent use of features like auto-embed, drag-and-drop for images and other media, table styling, alignment functionality, text coloring, and font styling. “We consider these plugins really useful,” says Regis. “Anything that allows users to add and manage rich media placement in the WYSIWYG interface is very helpful.” Regis also adds that once they saw how fantastically the editor was running after the update, they want to keep it up-to-date at all times.
Just because the product is easier to use and works so smoothly, as there are accessibility and usability features available, we get fewer questions because users have a much easier time.
When talking about user reactions and benefits of updating, Regis goes on to say that they were able to see the difference in the number of support requests. “Just because the product is easier to use and works so smoothly, as there are accessibility and usability features available, we get fewer questions like “how do I make it look like this?”, “how do I do that?” because they have a much easier time.” Users now have more editing options, which they eagerly take advantage of. When it comes to the technical side of things, they are happy to set up the infrastructure however they like, and still use and integrate the product seamlessly.