Over the past year we have collaborated with a television network to completely rebuild their common web platform and user interface for their international channel brands.
With over 15 distinct international television channels spread over 70 sites now and more to come, the first site rolled out late September in Asia (http://www.axn-asia.com), today AXN in Brazil went live with 10 more regions slated to rollout over the next two months including India, Spain and Taiwan.
Through direct feedback from their markets worldwide, we worked with the company to re-invent the digital content system that will grow with their business. Over the course of the next year they will replace all existing sites that are on its previous common platforms with the new platform, one single common platform to manage all of their content. The platform was built with an eye towards the future with scale planned far beyond the robust initial offering. With an improved user experience, advertising kit and administrative power, the platform engages everywhere, can handle Paywall services, OTT and exposes its content for use across native mobile and desktop applications.
This content management system (CMS) was built from the ground up and will support over 150 websites around the world of varying needs and marketing initiatives. The new system includes RSS and API capabilities allowing the websites to feed content to third parties or easily accept feeds from third parties. The new platform is one of the largest Drupal 7 based multi-site implementations to date and may also be the largest implementation of Drupal Panels ever released; a system that allows utmost flexibility and offers site managers an easy way to customize their site with a number of powerful widgets. The framework itself is extremely robust and allows countries all over the world to deploy customized websites in a mere six weeks.
Key new features include:
-On-page configurable modules for easy updating
-Improved content administration and workflow to increase efficiencies
-Completely rebuilt UI/UX architecture, base toolkit, documentation of visual standards and theming implementation for use by international vendors
-Improved JS library and capabilities as well as updated CSS standards and markup
-Robust 3rd party integrations
-Easy content syndication across all sites
-Full services based content API to free content for other platforms
-Social media integration leveraging Gigya, such as Single Sign-on, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social graph plugins
-Enhanced layout for tablet display
By, Barbara Pritchard, Smashing Director of Production
