Turner Broadcasting is home to some of the most recognisable global entertainment brands, such as Boomerang, Cartoon Network, CNN, TCM, and TNT. Our brief was to create a platform that enables the rapid roll-out of websites for their General Entertainment (GE) brands across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Atchai Digital developed the platform architecture, undertook the creative design and development and delivered each brand site build on the platform. The project is managed end-to-end with our Agile process. The framework supports multiple sites, each of which can turn shared functionality on or off. Sites can be deployed for regions and content can be shared and translated for each regional language. To date, we have delivered three products within the framework: TNT Benelux, TNT Nordic (in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish), and Star TV (in Africa and Nordic regions).

Current list of completed sites/URLs in the framework: http://www.tnt-tv.be, http://www.tnt-tv.se/, http://www.tnt-tv.no/, http://www.tnt-tv.fi/, http://www.tnt-tv.dk/, http://www.starafrica.tv/, http://www.startv.nu/

Why Drupal was chosen: 

We chose Drupal primarily because of its multilingual and multi-site capabilities. We've successfully used Drupal to build enterprise-level CMS websites before, we know that it can scale to high levels of traffic and maintain availability and performance.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Enable fast and efficient roll-out of new General Entertainment-Brand websites

We write user stories to capture stakeholder requirements. This keeps us focussed on where the value is when prioritising features each iterative 3 week development cycle. Drupal allows us to develop functionality in a generic way, so that it can be easily shared across sites. Our continuous integration process, with human and automated testing environments, reduces risk in deployments, helps us manage regression bugs, and ensures a stable, robust product. The time to build a new channel site has been reduced from months to weeks.

Maximise flexibility for regional website editors

Drupal's multilingual and internationalization capabilities allow us to deploy the same site for multiple regions and define an editorial workflow to match the requirements of the content editors. Some regions have multiple languages, in which case it's possible to share content and assets, and promote different content for each language. This has opened up new possibilities for producers and content editors, facilitating content sharing and saving time managing sites.

Optimise for mobile

We used a responsive design approach, developing the information architecture for three core device formats - desktop, tablet and mobile. Core mobile and desktop styles are inherited when creating a new site. The sub-theme is customized according to each channels brand style guideline. This means there is minimal effort required to support all devices when rolling out a new site.

Each brand site must have a unique identity

After digesting the requirements and understanding the audience for the first brand sites, we developed an information architecture with flexible elements that could be switched in or out, transformed and heavily styled. For each brand site, we then consider the audience and existing brand style guides to produce visual designs based on our wireframes. By simply theming our core elements, and overriding where necessary, we're able to ensure that each site maintains its positioning and has a unique look and feel, without increasing the development cost.

Technical specifications

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Strongarm and Features:

We built a Drupal multi-site architecture that enables us to share functionality between sites, using Features and Strongarm to package configuration. It was also necessary to use Features extra to package Nodequeues.

Omega, Delta and Context:

We used Omega as our base theme because of its integration with Delta. We created a sub-theme ("turner_ge") that sets up the grid, layout and media queries across all sites in the framework. For each brand, we create a sub-theme of the "turner_ge" theme. Delta and Context are used to customize the layout of pages for each brand site.

Internationalization (i18n)

We used these modules to enable block, string and variable translation, customizable admin language and translation sets. Drupal's translation features mean we can run multiple languages from the same DB.

Search API and Solr

We used Apache Solr because of it scalability and because faceted search meant we could make it work within a multilingual context.

Feeds

We use Feeds to import TV programme schedule information from a variety of sources. Most of this data is supplied in XML format, so we used the Feeds XPath Parser to help us write a custom parser for XML data.

SEO

The following modules help with SEO requirements: XML sitemap, Pathauto, Sub-pathauto, Redirect, Meta tag, Global Redirect, Context Metadata.

Community contributions: 
Organizations involved: 
Project team: 

Turner Broadcasting

  • Olly Holmes (Product Manager)

Atchai Digital

  • John Griffin (Principal Consultant)
  • Rob Hardwick (Technical Lead)
  • Vamory Traore (Back-end developer)
  • Sungsit Sawaiwan (Front-end developer)
  • Ben Merrington (Designer)
  • Fergus Roche (UX Consultant)
  • Anna Seabrook (Project Manager)
Star and TNT on mobile
Sectors: 
Enterprise
Entertainment
Media
Publishing

Comments

jatheepan’s picture

Well done in utilizing Drupal :)

Jean Gionet’s picture

VERY impressive and well done!

A Day In The Life

benjaminkyta’s picture

With Omega. I like that

Benjamin Kiyita Lutaaya | www.lutaaya.net | +256 794 600 025 | me@lutaaya.net

srivastav abhishek’s picture

Well done, congrats for that . I just want to know , how much time it taken to complete , with the no. of person . Please tell me.

chandra.drupal’s picture

used drupal in a fullfledge

TeddyG’s picture

very impressive , i guess you have used view slide show capabilities efficiently ....
can you share us your experience how you managed to style the navigation arrows at the bottom and the small images at the top of the slideshow on your home page, it looks very nice!!! . thanks

shamio’s picture

How did you added images to menus in top of page? Now when i move mouse on "Series" menu, there are some links in left and in right of them, i see two images. how did you do that?

zgos’s picture

I like this web site. Thank you for you share.

KWang’s picture

Finally a big site among all these samples. We need to add rather large websites here imho.

Kevin