Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
BlueMars GmbH (Lead agency), Frankfurter Societäts-Medien GmbH (Publisher), Federal Foreign Office of Germany (Partner)
Visit the site
Visit the siteCommunity contributions
We committed improvement to "our" modules Content Menu (http://drupal.org/project/content_menu) and Search Api Entity Translation (http://drupal.org/project/search_api_et).
The cross-media Germany portal, deutschland.de, aims to present a comprehensive, modern and topical picture of Germany abroad.
Deutschland.de offers multilingual services primarily targeting international users. Six sections (politics, economics, culture, environment, knowledge and life) offer access to topics that are important to people in Germany. The diverse relationships with partner countries around the world are also given prominent treatment.
Deutschland.de's topical content is supplied by renowned German and international journalists and scientists, a dedicated editorial staff and other contractual partners of the Foreign Office (DAPD, dpa, Deutsche Welle).
The range of articles is extended by background articles, dossiers, videos and commented link tips.
It is a service provided by the publisher Societäts-Medien GmbH, Frankfurt-am-Main, in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin.
The Frankfurt based media agency BlueMars, which was responsible for the overall implementation of deutschland.de, turned to Wunderkraut for Drupal expertise.
Wunderkraut built the site's Drupal architecture and implementation. We also provided the BlueMars team with training and consulting for Drupal and Agile methods, so they could quickly get up to speed for design implementation and import interface. We at Wunderkraut are happy to have provided Drupal and Agile expertise to this project to contribute to our partner's and customers' success.
About the project
Business objectives
The business objective of the deutschland.de relaunch was to:
- Attract a global audience with a modern and more flexible magazine platform.
- Integrate effortlessly with the existing cross-media publishing workflow.
- Realize efficiency gains via consolidation.
The new Drupal website deutschland.de replaces three older sites running on Typo3, an old first generation hierarchical CMS.
The new content concept called for a more flexible structure: editors should be able to categorize articles in different systems (topics, world regions, tags) and the site should deliver topical streams of content for different interests and in different languages.
Technology: Drupal takes over the lead
Technically, the new deutschland.de concept called for:
- Content structured using multiple taxonomies. This was achieved with Drupal's 'out of the box' taxonomy system paired with the Views module.
- Iterative import from the customer's existing cross-media publishing solution. Drupal's open APIs, clean concepts and flexibility made it easy to adapt to the existing IT and workflows by using RESTful web services to push content to Drupal.
- Multilingual content in seven languages (including Russian, Chinese and Arabic). This was realized with field-based Entity Translations.
- Clean and highly-responsive design implementation.
Results
The different project partners managed to deliver a great integration of their teams and other professionals. Using Scrum as Agile project management method enabled smooth collaboration between distributed teams.
Efficiency gains have been evident from the start. The integration into the existing cross-media workflow works effortlessly across companies and networks.
The consolidated site's straightforward, unified Drupal interface is simple and fast to use. The new content structure offers editors and audiences great flexibility, and Drupal makes life much easier for the editors at Societäts-Medien publishing house in Frankfurt, compared to former solutions.
Why Drupal was chosen
The new Drupal website http://www.deutschland.de is replacing three older sites that have been running on Typo3, a hierarchical open source CMS very popular in Germany. The new content concept, however, called for a more flexible structure, where editors categorize articles in different systems (topics, world regions, tags) and the site delivers topical streams of content for different kinds of interests and in different languages. Drupal is the perfect match: field-based multilanguage management, multiple taxonomies in parallel, semantic content types. Drupal delivered most of what deutschland.de needed out of the box.
A further reason for choosing Drupal was its flexibility and openness when connecting to other systems. Articles are, for example, imported via RESTful web services.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The combination of Panels and Views was chosen for their flexibility in designing individual pages but still make page creation an almost automatic process with minimal user interaction.
The powerful tools to categorize content work in tandem with the Views module to create topical and regional 'feeds' that enable visitors to get content that interests them quickly.
