Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Other Organizations:
- Al Jazeera America (AJAM)
- Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN)
Team Members:
- Rizwan Ahmed (AJMN)
- Tian Chen (AJAM)
- Candace Knowsley (AJAM)
Phase2 Team Members:
- Tanner Heffner
- Julia Pirsch (Anexis)
- Nina Samberg
- Karen Taylor
- Ed Velez (D.o username: sinmemoria)
- Riche Zamor
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
We contributed fixes/patches for some contrib modules:
- Lightning media
- Workbench Moderation
- Password policy
- Simple Address field
- Multiversion: here and here
- Content Lock
Growing with Drupal 8
Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN) is a global provider in news and media broadcasting. It distributes content in multiple languages, genres, and formats on a wide range of conventional and digital platforms, connected devices, and via commercial partners. In its 20th year, Al Jazeera is experiencing tremendous expansion of its operations across all distribution channels and platforms. The network partnered with Phase2 to couple its growth with a number of strategic technology initiatives.
In service of their growth goals, Phase2 built a world-class Drupal 8 platform to unify Al Jazeera’s suite of digital publishing sites. The CMS plays a central role as their main tool for content production, while establishing a central code base for innovation and standardizing editorial workflow processes across the network.
About the project
Goals
- Unify disparate digital systems and workflows of AJMN to make content from all networks available through a single interface.
- Reduce the overhead and technical debt of supporting many disparate systems with variations of the same kind of content.
- Create an example of best practices in Drupal 8, API integration, and technical documentation.
- Use a common content management platform to launch microsites faster and with less headache.
- Develop a baseline framework for a future state Comprehensive Unified CMS
- Drupal 8-based distribution.
Requirements
- For the initial baseline platform framework:
- Platform distribution configuration to provide packaging for simple installation of a new instance of the CMS, including multi-lingual support (English and Arabic).
- User registration and management for administrators and editors.
- Discovery dashboard to centralize access to recently published content.
- Content type development for common news site elements.
- Internationalization.
- Editorial workflow for administrator and editor roles.
- Admin/Editor pages themed with AJ branded colors.
- Simple media management .
- End user site search.
Navigation menu in both Arabic and English:
Outcome
Phase2 delivered a baseline Drupal 8 platform that included the requirements listed above in June, 2016, for Al Jazeera to use for the implementation for a new version of their Mubasher web site. The Mubasher website would be the first website on the new unified platform. There were three profiles created: a “CMS” profile to be used for network sites like Mubasher, a “content hub” profile to manage the repository of content to be distributed to the sites on the network, and a “search” profile to serve as a global network search.
The platform enhances agility, accessibility, collaboration, and productivity for editors. Equally important, Al Jazeera achieved better governance and security of more diverse, consumer-friendly content.
As a global media network, Al Jazeera knew it was crucial to prioritize internationalization, future growth, and flexibility in its technology strategy. As the industry changes, it will be important for Al Jazeera to quickly pivot to capitalize on digital trends like omni-channel. After working with Phase2, Al Jazeera is now one step closer to its digital vision: increasing growth, engagement, and retention of content across all channels, devices, and users with a dynamic, unified enterprise platform.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
Al Jazeera already had a number of websites running on Drupal and an established relationship with Acquia for hosting. Al Jazeera had worked through a lengthy discovery and planning process that resulted in the decision to consolidate content management for all AJMN sites on Drupal and a set of business requirements documents outlining the core functionality for that consolidated platform.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
We chose Lightning to quickly get us needed features out-of-the-box, such as workflow and media management and enhanced previewing functionality in Drupal 8.
