ZEIT online Communities

Dear Drupal Community,

ZEIT online is the Website of the weekly german Newspaper DIE ZEIT. Today we relaunched our Campus Community http://uni.zeit.de with Drupal. Drupal does not replace the main CMS we use for creating zeit.de, but Drupal is the basis for almost all user centered projects we will be launchin in the near future. And we plan a few things. But let's go back to beginning of the story:

In October 2006, ZEIT online launched its Campus community for the first time. So far, this project based almost completely on proprietary developments created by ZEIT online employees. However, in the beginning of 2007, after evaluating this community and other open-source based community, we found that considering future requirements and tasks a system migration towards the web content management system Drupal seemed to be the most promising approach.

Our experiences in developing and maintaining PHP based web applications were an appropriate guideline in our decision process, and we chose Drupal because this system convinced us in various aspects:
the Drupal system core is extremely persuasive, with improvements in the current version 5.x that originally kept us away from using Drupal in summer 2006
the module based architecture and the vast number of available modules provide all the standard functionalities that are necessary for a community and full fill almost all further demands that we have with regard to our specific community solution
Drupal's capacity to run various communities with different layouts on the same code base, where those „instances“ share specific modules and data, provides huge flexibility for any extension or enhancement we plan
Finally, IBM's detailed and excellent survey further strengthened our confidence in Drupal and its level of professionalism

Between February and May 2007, the community relaunch was planned and implemented with the help of the companies erdfisch and Digitalkombinat. During the implementation process, Drupal has proven more than once that it is a brilliant system, as occurring problems could be solved quickly and new requirements implemented in a clean and convincing manner. Drupal was able to manage many challenges that are typical for projects with a short implementation period: either simply by the use of standard features or by the installation of modules that are already available from Drupal's open source community.

The current result of our developments is a Drupal installation that runs four different communities. Only one of them will go online during the first launch, but the others will follow soon. All four communities share the same user stock with a total of 170,000 registered users, which means that a user will be able to participate in all communities by using the same user name and password. Other modules and functions of the communities still run separately from each other at the moment.

The current system consists of the following modules:

- Multi site setup with single sign on
- Multiple instances with a single user base
- Module Core
- Blog
- Comment
- Forum
- Help
- Locale
- Menu
- Path
- Poll
- Profile
- Search
- Taxonomy
- Tracker
- Module Contributed
- auto_nodetitle
- buddylist
- cck
- commentrss
- helptip
- image
- invite
- jrating
- legal
- moxie
- nodefamily
- nodeprofile
- nodeprofile_promote (newly developed by erdfisch)
- og
- pathauto
- privatemsg
- profile_integration (newly developed by erdfisch)
- tagadelic
- userlink
- usernode
- views
- votingapi
- jRating
- commnt_rating (newly developed by erdfisch)

The newly developed Modules will be made public soon.

Furthermore, our Drupal installation is supported by the Zend Platform. It provides not only a performance increase but also a professional tool for supervising the application and several communities on a technical level, and it can also be used for the identification of problems and errors and thus is a valuable device for quality assurance and improvements of the modules we use.

We plan to grant the Drupal community access to the Zend platform so that running modules can be evaluated by any interessted. Yet we are not sure, however, in which way this access is going to be realised.

The development of the following modules (in cooperation with our partners erdfisch and Digitalkombinat) is in progress at the moment:

- extended RSS node – allows our members improved RSS usage within the community and our websites – and RSS also should be promoted in general

- project briefcase – eases the manageability of collaborative work and provides better structuring of node amounts for the user

- an enhanced backend in order to improve community management possibilities for the marketing and editorial staff

Additional modules and communities are planned. From these modules we hope we can return to the Drupal Community as much as possible for us – meant as gratitude for this outstanding tool and for a „better tomorrow“.

P.S.: Please feel free to contact us - community-technik@zeit.de