Building a New Website for insidestory.gr

The Insidestory.gr team wanted a new, modern design for their website that would meet their growing needs. In addition, they wanted to migrate all of their content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and adopt Drupal Commerce to manage subscriptions, payments, and other business functions.

• Subscription migration: A major challenge for the project was migrating user subscriptions from the old system, which had undergone multiple modifications over its lifetime, resulting in many subscriptions that required special handling.
• Complexity of old data: The old data had significant complexity as there were card payments, deposit payments, prepaid payments, coupon payments, free subscriptions, group corporate subscriptions, annual, monthly or with some days free. In addition, there were several subscriptions with incomplete or incorrect data that did not pass the validation of the new system.
• Maintaining automatic renewal: Very important for the client was to maintain automatic renewal for those who had chosen it through their credit card. To achieve this goal, the tokens were maintained and an exhaustive check was made for the smooth operation, ensuring that they would work smoothly with both the old and new systems.
• Testing and optimization: For the above, many tests, coordination with the bank, a lot of custom code and dozens to hundreds of test migrations were needed until we achieved something that would pass the tests 100%. Finally, an optimization of the data transfer (migration) performance was implemented, significantly reducing the execution time and ensuring smooth repetition whenever needed.

We integrated Drupal Commerce into the site, enhancing Insidestory.gr's subscription and offer management capabilities.

Advantages:

• Simple subscription management: The Insidestory.gr team can now easily manage subscriptions, orders, coupons, and offers, saving time and resources.
• Recurring Payments Support: The site supports recurring payments (automatic renewal), offering users a convenient and reliable option to pay for their subscriptions.
• Soft Paywall: The implementation of Soft Paywall allows users to have trial access to premium content, increasing revenue and audience engagement.
• Free Trial Subscription: Users can try Insidestory.gr subscriptions for free for a specified period of time, evaluating the value of the content before subscribing.

We developed a custom AI Text-to-Speech (TTS) service, fully integrated into Drupal, that automatically converts article content into high-quality spoken narration. The solution leverages Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, using the Gemini 3.1 Text-to-Speech model to generate natural-sounding speech. To support long-form articles, the system dynamically splits the content into smaller segments, processes each segment independently, and then merges the generated audio into a single MP3 file using FFmpeg. The entire workflow runs asynchronously through the Drupal Queue API and cron workers, ensuring high performance, reliability, and zero impact on the website's user experience. The final audio file is automatically associated with the corresponding article and made available through a custom audio player developed specifically for the project.