Every day, 600 000 French speakers watch their local media, and over a million follow local news on the web. This is where WebstanZ comes in.
Like you, we like and watch local news. Like you, we don't watch it at fixed times in our living rooms, but also and above all via their websites and social networks. Like you, we're convinced that news that tells the story of our region has a rightful place in our country's audiovisual landscape.
We started the project with three people, and ended up with seven. We started by solving emergencies, and ended the project with a long-term strategy that ultimately convinced seven local media: Antenne Centre, Boukè, Canal Zoom, Télémb, Télésambre, TV Com and Vedia.
Your mission,
if you accept it…
- Local media: "We need to take a technological step forward by strengthening our digital presence to complement our traditional broadcasting. We would like to achieve economies of scale by sharing costs between several operators.”.
- Us : “Okay, that's what Drupal is for. We'll build you a multi-site distribution, making your sites more dynamic and adapting them to web standards.”.
In a complex budgetary and competitive context, with the challenge of saturation that we all know, and with... 7 project owners with different objectives and specificities. Above all, we had to find a common vision.
Everyone agreed that we had to take advantage of the situation by pooling sites, while retaining their own specific features.
Create a toolbox that meets 95% of all needs
More than for any other project, this one requires ongoing dialogue and co-construction with the teams from the 7 local TV stations. We have used the Agile methodology, which is human-centered and focused on communication, advocating for early delivery and continuous improvement.
The key to success: a toolbox that meets 95% of the needs shared by the 7 players. We set to work to create a common core from a single development, to share and minimize costs. The result: 7 separate, independent sites, built from a single code base.
We've pushed the principle of mutualization to the limit, with 80% common base and 20% customization for each local TV station.
The benefits?
- Less maintenance, because it's done for everyone at the same time.
- More quality thanks to pooled budgets for the core curriculum.
- Faster time-to-market by limiting the time required for minimum configuration for each installation.
Working with 7 local TV stations was a challenge worthy of our ambitions. We had to create a customizable layout that was easy to adapt to each TV; create graphic elements to differentiate them, and different atmospheres depending on the context... All this is easily conceivable thanks to Drupal.
The key features
Drupal,
ideal for mutualization and interfacing
Thanks to Drupal, we've been able to meet our customers' objectives: deliver fast and improve; pool resources; retain our own specific features... And really listen to their needs, by interfacing a third-party tool (Media Asset Management, MAM) to the sites.
One of the local TV stations has developed an in-house tool in which journalists encode their content, which is then automatically ported to Drupal. The users of this MAM are journalists, who are used to logging in and adding their content. When they log on, all the information they have added to the MAM is integrated into the website via webservices.
One of Drupal's great strengths is its flexibility:
- This makes it possible to link the 7 sites with the journalists' content management system to push articles online in real time.
- Minimizes development and support costs by enabling multi-site distribution.
