Sector(s)

Team Members

drupallerina, vierlex, grienauer, criz

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

As with all projects of acolono GmbH, necessary improvements and fixes for Drupal Core and Contrib Modules will be made available to the community on drupal.org. Some project-specific examples are the following issues on drupal.org

https://www.drupal.org/project/tmgmt/issues/3063547
https://www.drupal.org/project/shariff/issues/3040508

Data protection and data privacy is very important to us, which is why we have published the Drupal integration of the privacy-compliant shariff sharing buttons from heise.de on drupal.org and have been maintaining the module with the support of the community since then: https://www.drupal.org/project/shariff

Among other things, we have developed a further special module for use in this project, which allows the embedding of website and social media elements in compliance with data protection regulations: https://www.drupal.org/project/betterembed

NOYB (stands for "My Privacy is None Of Your Business") is a Vienna-based NGO dedicated to the enforcement of data protection within the European Union. Founded by Max Schrems, among others, the association has already successfully filed complaints against large corporations such as Google and Facebook for their intransparent practices in processing personal data for advertising purposes.

A special reason for the relaunch of the site was the desire to be able to publish content in as many languages as possible and as quickly as possible. Furthermore, there were special requirements regarding the editorial workflow, security, privacy and performance.

NOYB reached out to acolono GmbH to create the new website.
 

About the project

Multilingualism and editorial workflow

A special requirement was that the website should be available in as many languages as possible and that the content, such as news, should be translated promptly into all languages. For this purpose, an automated translation workflow was implemented outside the usual Thunder workflows, i.e. articles are created in English and then automatically translated into all existing languages with the help of the Translation Management Module (tmgmt). This is done via Google Translation for the Greek language (tmgmt_google) and DeepL (tmgmt_deepl) for all other languages. The quality of these translations is now really impressive.

The automatically translated content is published immediately. The user is informed that the content has been automatically translated (i.e. this content gets a special status). 

Once an editor has checked the translation, the status is removed and the notice is no longer displayed. There is a separate user role for this activity. Special administration pages provide a list of content that needs to be checked and users with appropriate language skills are notified by e-mail when new content is added. 

Backend Usability

The backend is intuitive and can be used even by inexperienced translators. Sometimes a short introduction is necessary.

Security and Privacy

Due to the activities of the association there were also special requirements for security and data privacy. So a two-factor authentication for all logins was implemented and the integration of third party content was completely abandoned. The webfonts are loaded locally and a self-hosted Matomo instance is used for content analytics. The old website was analyzed by the Chaos Computer Club Vienna (C3W) regarding privacy and security, including necessary improvements for the relaunch. Valuable services were provided by the seckit module, among others.

Performance

Due to the international reporting on the activities of the association, there may suddenly be very high traffic numbers and load peaks. The website and the server need therefore be prepared as well as possible. An analysis with Google Lighthouse shows a clearly recognizable improvement compared to the old site. 

Why Drupal was chosen

Originally the website was built by WordPress. But it was lacking multilingual capabilities, a decent editorial workflow and performance during traffic peaks.

Drupal was a perfect fit, because it

  • is multilingual in its core,

  • loads fast even during high traffic times because of its advanced caching features,

  • is secure, not only because of the great work by the drupal.org security team,

  • provides advanced workflow features for editors

  • is Open Source,

  • and is driven by a huge community that is providing enhancements and support for nearly every use case.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Thunder is a great starter kit for nearly every Drupal website.

The Translation Management module (tmgmt), in combination with its extension modules for Google Translate and DeepL, provides a great way to automate translations.

Security Kit and Two Factor Authentication are two very beneficial modules regarding security.