It takes a village to transform the digital platform of a large publishing conglomerate

We'll take you through the digital transformation journey of Crain Communications and its various publications. We'll show how a custom Drupal 8 distribution, deployed on a multi-site setup is helping brands like AdAge and Automotive News launch new products as well as redesign their existing digital platforms.

Description

We'll also take a look at how a Drupal project of this scale can look like in 2018:

• 25 developers across Detroit, New York, New Delhi and Goa
• 4 business analysts
• A dedicated UI/UX team
• Product Council: product owners, brand representatives, editors, governance team
• Continuos Integration/Development: 15 * 3 (environments) = 45 sites, sharing the same base profile, release management
• Audience management, Marketing, Advertising Operations and other aspects of the publishing world

The session involves live Drupal 8 demoes, stories of real people (a village actually, with over 35 people involved full time) and digital transformation journey of a large publishing conglomerate (with Drupal at the center of this journey).

Drupal 8

• Demo of the Drupal 8 publishing platform:
  • how we used paragraphs, block API, panelizer, layouts etc to build a platform that allows each publication to build/configure (NOT develop) and manage their own sites.
  • how configuration management, blocks as entities and other Drupal 8 concepts enabled us to build such a platform.
  • how TWIG enabled us to use Patternlab to do independent front end development as well as set up a Global styleguide for Crain.
  • we'll setup a couple of unique looking sites using the platform during the demo.

Scale

• with 5 sites already live (Crain's Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit & AdAge Creativity), the platform sees a combined traffic of over ~100k unique daily site visitors.
• 5-7 more sites should be live by DrupalCon Seattle. Total of 10-12 more sites will go onto the platform over the next few months.
• how we leveraged Acquia's enterprise cloud solutions to support a large multi site setup.
• with a 25+ developer team, how did Agile principles as well as an extremely strong governance process around requirement gathering, platform governance and remote collaboration shaped the project.

Drupal for publishers

• what made Crain choose Drupal and Open Source?
• what benefits, apart from the Drupal 8 features shown in the demo above, did Crain get by consolidating into a single digital platform, moving away from a combination of proprietary & legacy CMSs.
• what are newsrooms looking from from their digital platforms and how does the print workflow look like.