Sector(s)

Team Members

fago, oliver_berndt, jjchinquist, Knud Frank, sinduri, pagach, alex_ieremia, aludescher, arthur_lorenz, ciprian.stavovei, karimcossutti, mbm80, maximilianmikus, dawitti, hideaway, Andre-B, ckohl, michaellenahan

Project Team

Client: MFI Meine Familie und Ich Verlag GmbH
 

Additional Team Members:
Johannes TraschĂĽtz (Head of Department, BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH)
Jessica Schlenker (Product Owner, BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH)
Arlind Quni (Product Owner, BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH)
Miriam Feurer (Product Owner, BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH)
Nicole Baudendistel (Product Owner, BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH)
 

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

The project included contributions to the Drupal community, such as:

  • Patches for contrib modules like Cache Tools and Preserve Page Cache.
  • Custom frontend components published on GitHub, including Vue Lupus Rating and Vue Lupus Slider.
  • A session at Drupal Europe: Building High-Performance Thunder Sites.

einfachbacken.de, a leading recipe platform for baking recipes, was developed as a mobile-first project to deliver recipes and an engaging user experience. This was the first website in a high-performing multi-site instance, acting as a springboard for additional sites, e.g. daskochrezept.de, (a now outdated version of) beebetter.de and 3 others. Powered by Drupal with the Thunder distribution, the site combines Vue.js, SOLR, and Cloudflare CDN to deliver fast, reliable performance. From an SEO perspective, structured data and custom tokens help each recipe stand out on search engines and social media. 

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)

The einfachbacken.de team aimed to share “Geling garantie” (German for “fail-proof”) recipes in order to become the go-to resource for hobby bakers. To achieve this, they used an in-house studio kitchen, perfecting their processes, and in the end published a vast collection of reliable and delicious recipes that anyone can bake. Recipe steps (Drupal paragraphs) with interactive Vue.js components allowed for ingredient amounts to be calculated and auto-adjusted. Streaming video was added to the project, such that the steps were filmed and put online.
To make the project excel in SEO, schema.org structured, json+ld formatted (recipe) meta data was added to the page. Recipe specific meta data, based on the recipe and recipe steps, including cooking times and ingredient amounts, ensured google search results were optimized.
To enhance user engagement, a detailed comment & 5-star rating system was introduced, including a custom review workflow for the Einfachbacken editors. This moderation system allowed for valuable reviews of recipes, ensuring that bots & non-serious hobby bakers (i.e. readers of the website) were filtered out and did not affect the quality of reviews.
The website was created with a "mobile-first" approach, ensuring optimized load times and seamless performance on mobile devices, which are key to both user experience and ad-driven revenue models. For key recipe & article images, editors could upload an optimized mobile and tablet image version.
From an economic perspective, cost efficiency was achieved through a multi-site installation, enabling streamlined operations while supporting the platform’s growth and revenue generation.

Goals

  • Develop a mobile-first, performance-optimized platform.
  • Ensure intuitive content management tools for editors.
  • Establish a cost-efficient, scalable multi-site architecture.
  • Focus on SEO to enhance discoverability.

Requirements

  • Integrate Vue.js instead of jQuery for a modern frontend experience.
  • Implement robust caching strategies for fast page loads.
  • Optimize the platform for search experience.
  • Provide editors with flexible tools for efficient workflows.

Outcome
The project delivered impressive performance by leveraging granular Drupal caching and CDN integration, resulting in fast page loads for an optimal user experience. SEO performance was also significantly enhanced through Schematic meta tags from Schema.org and structured data from JSON + Id. Custom tokens with fallback logic were developed to ensure optimal metadata display for social sharing and Google search results. User engagement saw a boost through the implementation of features like lazy loading, making the site more interactive and efficient. Content management was streamlined for editors with tailored backend tools, enabling faster and more efficient content updates. Additionally, the multi-site architecture provided substantial cost savings, reducing operational expenses while ensuring scalability.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen to streamline Burda’s publishing projects and leverage the in-house Thunder distribution, which offered tailored publishing tools and workflows suited to the needs of the baking platform. The flexibility and scalability of Drupal provided the perfect foundation for a mobile-first, high-performance solution.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Thunder: Distribution for publishing tools and workflows.
Search API: Advanced search functionality extending Drupal core, with integration options for Solr, ElasticSearch, and Algolia.
Voting API: Supporting user engagement features through structured voting and rating functionality.
Schema.org Metatag: Enhancing SEO performance by structuring metadata for search engines and social media.