al arabiya news channel: publishing articles at the speed of light
DESCRIPTION
This presentation was given at Amplify Miami 2014 by Davide Guzzetti, Consultant and Web Project Manager at Tinext. With 70 million users per month and peaks of 20,000 visitors per second, AlArabiya.net is the most accessed news source of the Middle East. This presentation describes how Tinext’s implementation of Magnolia CMS helped the 24/7 active, 180-people of Al Arabiya’s editorial team to smoothly write and publish their articles on the news portal. Moreover, some custom features - dashboards, personalisation of page editor, and advanced workflow - are presented so to demonstrate how Tinext could meet the tough requirement of entering an article in the system and having it published in less than 3 minutes.TRANSCRIPT
DD.MM.YYYY at Venue/Customer First Last, Role
Keeping the news giant Al Arabiya at the forefront of breaking news
1 Version 1.0 Magnolia is a registered trademark owned by Magnolia International Ltd.
Davide Guzzetti, Consultant & Project Manager Tinext Date: 19.02.2014
! About Al Arabiya news channel and AlArabiya.net
! About Tinext
! An overview of AlArabiya projects
! Why Magnolia
! Customizing Magnolia for fast article publishing
! Editorial dashboard
! Non-linear workflow
! Revamping AlArabiya English
! “The switch”
! Key achievements
! A few takeaways
2
Agenda
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3
About TINEXT
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Tinext combines the latest digital marketing expertise together with the deep technical understanding of a seasoned enterprise systems integrator. ! Three core practices:
! Digital marketing (IA, UX, mobile, social)
! Systems integration (enterprise java devs, verticalized on Magnolia)
! Managed Cloud Services (fully managed hosted Magnolia applications) Since 2001, our teams have conceived, delivered, deployed and maintained more than 500 successful projects, with clients including Al Arabiya News Channel, Royal Caribbean International, Whirlpool Europe, City of Lausanne, Generali Group and Swiss national broadcasters RSI.
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Who is Al Arabiya News Channel?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnwXUR4SDVo
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Key facts about Al Arabiya and alarabiya.net
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+70 mio visitors/month
x10
= 10 times the population of Switzerland
4 languages arabic, english,
urdu, farsi
4 sites, +30 sections
23 mio potential viewers
160’000 webpages
Most visited website of the middle-east
+200 articles
published every day
40 editors
publishing 24/7
traffic peaks of
20’000
visitors per sec
2 channels all-news 24/7
6
AlArabiya projects at a glance
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CMS REPLACEMENT ARABIC REVAMP
ENGLISH REVAMP
ONGOING MAINTENANCE
June 2012 March 2013 September 2013 November 2013 today
! CMS Replacement
! From a custom proprietary CMS to a bespoke Magnolia CMS implementation
! AlArabiya English website revamp
! New front-end (responsive layout) + additional features
! AlArabiya Arabic website revamp
! New front-end (responsive layout) + additional features
! Ongoing maintenance
! Fixing, new features, architectural changes
7
Al Arabiya Projects at a glance /2
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MAGNOLIA CMS
! From a custom proprietary CMS to a bespoke Magnolia CMS implementation
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CMS replacement
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Nuxeo DAM
CDN
Limelight video
repository
Reuters feed
Feeds for
MOBILE APPS
Newsletter iContact
SOLR search
TWC feeds
Live streaming
Legacy TV
systems
SOLR search
News letter
SOCIAL
! Responsive HTML
! New features and integrations, e.g. Video on Demand (VoD) section
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Front-end revamping
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The need
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cope with high traffic loads
fast article publishing
easiness of integrations
security against hackers’ attacks
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Advantages of Magnolia CMS
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cope with high traffic loads
fast article publishing
easiness of integrations
security against hackers’ attacks
scalability of the system
open source, easy to customize
seamless integration with
external systems and feeds
separation between author/public
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Most challenging requirement
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cope with high traffic loads
fast article publishing
easiness of integrations
security against hackers’ attacks
! Articles to be entered in the system and published as fast as possible
! Journalists, not webmasters
! Different newsrooms and different roles within newsrooms
! Huge amount of multimedia content (coming from the TV)
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Challenges
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How long are 3 minutes? The time for a coffee…
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…the Italian coffee
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What happens in 3 minutes
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NEWS ARRIVES
VIDEO/ IMAGES ADDED
NEWS IS EDITED
TEXT IS REVIEWED
NEWS ONLINE
NEWS UPDATED
OK FOR PUBLISHING
NEWS ASSIGNED
TO SECTIONS
3 minutes
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“We see hope everywhere”
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1. Different work environments (repositories)
2. In-line editing
3. Hierarchical structure of content
4. Linear workflow
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Quick article creation: areas of improvement
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Three different repositories
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DMS (assets)
INBOX (publication)
WEBSITE (content)
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Everything in one place: the editorial dashboard
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WEBSITE (content) DMS (assets) INBOX (publication)
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Direct upload to DMS
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Add files to the DMS by drag-and-drop Also supported while uploading:
Multilingual metadata Manual cropping/resizing adjustments
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Quick article creation: areas of improvement
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Single-step activation. Can occur:
! From the editorial dashboard ! From the article’s page (custom toolbar in the in-line editing view)
One-click publication
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Non-linear collaboration
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!
Workflow status per each role
Users are notified at each step
! Change in the presentation logic and business logic
! Responsive HTML
! New features and integrations, e.g. Video on Demand (VoD) section
! Switch to be done while live
! Redirection of traffic on another server not possible (core shared features with other
sites and article entry process)
! No side-effects on the Arabic (most trafficked) website
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Al Arabiya English Revamp: Challenges
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! The “switch” is a feature allowing to switch from a set of templates, components and
configurations to another one
! Every site can define its own template file (and other settings) by simply adding a
suffix (e.g. “_en”) to a supported node or property
! This is done with a runtime override of Magnolia component definition, done with
paragraphs and templates renderers.
! This feature can be enabled/disabled by setting a configuration property as true/false
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“The Switch”
Version 1.1 Magnolia is a registered trademark owned by Magnolia International Ltd.
! Every site can
define its own
template file
(and other
settings) by
simply adding a
suffix (e.g.
“_en”) to a
supported node
or property
29
“The Switch”: how it works
Version 1.1 Magnolia is a registered trademark owned by Magnolia International Ltd.
! This is done with a runtime override of Magnolia component definition, done with
paragraphs and templates renderers.
30
“The Switch”: how it works /2
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!AARenderableDefinitionFactory.transformTemplateDefinition(definition, STKUtil.getSite().getTemplates().getPrototype(), content);!
! The new set of templates/components/configuration can be enabled/disabled by
setting a configuration property as true/false
! This is done at runtime with no need to stop the machines
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“The Switch”: how it works /3
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CONFIG/modules/aa-templating/config/siteBasedTemplating!
! Live DEMO on CMS stage Alrabiya
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“The Switch” in action
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! Immediate rollback in case of problems (5 seconds + cache)
! No need to stop the machines, nothing to be deployed
! No need for dual-entry
! Author instance used for previewing new layout and features, while Public instances
still presenting old layout
! No impacts on other websites
33
Benefits of this approach
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Credits
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Senior Software Engineer Matteo Pelucco Technical lead of Alarabiya Project [email protected]
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Key achievements
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articles are created in
<3 min with the previous
system where required 10-15 minutes
an article require
1 min to be live
only
2 steps for creating and
publishing a news
sections are created in
<20 min previously
was required 1 day
project completed in
11 months
English revamp completed in
3 months
change requests
10% of the overall project
+
2 public + 1 author
2 external repositories
(video / images)
100% CMS uptime
load time
3x faster
36
Live traffic at the time of going live (lowest peak 3.3 K)
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37
A few takeaways
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There is no perfect product for you. Customizations are always needed. Being an open source, Magnolia is easy to be tailored to suite specific needs of your business. Select a partner with experience in customizing the product. Have a best-of-breed approach: take the best CMS (Magnolia) and then integrate it with the best products in their specific area (DAM, CRM, analytics, e-shop…)
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Feel free to take one!
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39
Thank you for your attention
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Davide Guzzetti Project Manager Tinext sa [email protected] @ilguz
Digital marketing | Systems integration | Managed Cloud Services www.tinext.com