Sector(s)

Team Members

valic

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

From different integrations on EBL News for now we have contributed only one submodule for Media project - media_pixabay.

Although we think about publishing modules related to importing news from HINA (Croatian News Agency). And maybe some generic solutions for parsing NewsML-G2 format (XML) which is used by Deutsche Press Agency and seems to be standard in publishing industry.

EBL News is media portal covering trending stories about Politics, Business, Culture, Sport, Technology from Croatia, Balkan, Europe and rest of the World.

The web portal is launched in 2015 under the brand "About Croatia", and in mid-2016 got overall redesign under a new name and brand: EBL News. This case study is based on the latest design from February 2017.

Monthly on average EBL News have around 40k unique visitors and 100k pageviews. On some months portal has reached up to 200-300k unique users (trending on Reddit).

Our primary sources are DPA (Deutsche Press Agency) for worldwide coverage and Hina (Croatian news agency) for local and regional coverage of the Balkan region.

Portal is our internal project, so yes, we are Drupal and media company :-).

About the project

In the first phase of the project we have two goals:

  • Building fast multi-language media portal (First year EBL News was multi-language)
  • Make it scalable & easy to maintain from technical point of view

While EBL News cannot afford a lot of journalists/editors, so after year one goals are extended to following:

  • Workflow adjustments for articles: News import/updates
  • Workflow adjustments for media: Image search/saving to repository inside Drupal media
  • Workflow adjustments for merging articles
  • Add additional content from sources as Youtube to give articles more relevancy
  • Mobile first and clean design

Workflow adjustments for articles: News import/updates

Here we have integrated two different solutions for easier news management, so no more copy/paste from news agency website.

  1. Croatian News Agency (HINA) - current integration imports small excerpts from their website so that the editor can see about which topics articles are. If they want to import full news, editors just need to press button "import". Implementation is done in this way, while this agency has daily limit. So each full import is taking one credit from your account in their system.
  2. Deutsche Press Agency - they provide NewsML-G2 format (XML) and deliver it on your FTP. We grab all XML files and import them. Also, we make an update of existing articles if they receive updates.

On both imports we also auto-categorize article, and we import partial tags from each agency (not the best decision it seems now).

Workflow adjustments for media: Image search / saving to repository inside Drupal media

The fact is that most of the time is spent on searching images for articles. So we have implemented solutions for Media module that make a search of repository inside HINA (Croatian news agency), Pixabay and Flickr (only specific licenses there).

Image removed.

Workflow adjustments for merging articles

Even we have implemented updates for both integrations (DPA and Hina), a lot of articles are coming with different ID. Even they cover the same topic, so we cannot update them. So we have made options for merging articles with a notice on edit page if similar article already exist, published or unpublished.
Image removed.

Add additional content from sources as Youtube to give articles more relevancy

Using feeds module we import Youtube videos from few mayor publisher, and with Solr more like this option displaying them inside articles.

Also additional we have a separate Drupal installation on which we import approx. several thousands of nodes with feeds from around 100 news portals. Before we showed those entries as relevant below articles, but now we use them on single one page as RSS reader; For users who want to read news from European media sources only.

Mobile first and clean design

The first version of the design was also custom build (subtheme of Bootstrap) and featured here http://whatpixel.com/magazine-news-websites-gallery/ under former name "About Croatia". But this design was not mobile first, and too "heavy" for our taste.

With the current version, we wanted to have a mobile first approach with less CSS as possible to implement minimalistic design. We don't use any grid while the portal is pretty simple, so we don't see the need.

Why Drupal was chosen

While the project is our internal, and we are Drupal development company decision was clear from the beginning.
But also decision is based on our experience of several years working in and for a large publishing company.

Main criteria:

  • Open source
  • Regular security updates
  • Low cost of maintenance
  • Ease of integration and customization
  • Strong community
  • Scalability

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Views
The Views module provides a quick and easy way to create organised lists of content.

Media
One of the best solutions for media managment in Drupal 7

Features
Code / configuration managment between live/test/dev environments

Search API
Search pages and more like this blocks provided with Solr integration.

Revisioning
Important for our workflow not just to track changes, but also for all revisions of all imports from all news agencies which ELB News is using.