Radio France and Drupal : An ongoing process for the last three years

After maintaining for several years websites under different technologies, Radio France (the French public radio broadcasting group) which operates 7 radio stations and matching websites, opted for one industrial process to build them and to stick with it for a couple of years. Guess what? Drupal was chosen, and after 3 years of working hard on it we can say that we are very satisfied :-) We needed indeed a CMS capable of handling huge amounts of contents (articles, audio files, videos), able to provide a substantial contributing solution and that offers a simple interface for our web-editors.

One website after another, (www.franceculture.fr, www.franceinter.fr, www.franceinfo.fr, www.lemouv.fr, www.fipradio.fr) has been migrated to Drupal 6. They are built the same way which makes it very easy to switch from one to another.

When a correction is added to one of the websites, it can benefit the others. Very practical don’t you think? This also means that a web-editor can potentially work on every website since the back offices are alike: The process of creating content is the same for all back offices.

Currently we are working on www.francebleu.fr (the website of a network of our 43 local radios): we are adding a geolocalisation module. We’ll tell more about it when we launch it.

What You Listen On Air is What You Get Online

As part of the French public radio broadcasting group, our websites reflect the diversity of our radio programs broadcasted on FM and AM frequencies.

The main challenge we had to take up was to find an easy way to put online what is available on air. Audio files are transferred from our broadcast system to a library of media in back offices. For each on air program there is an online content. How do we do to match them? We developed a strong workflow process to match the audio files from the broadcast system with nodes: a node is automatically created when an audio file is transferred. It happens that a node is already created: in that case the audio file is directly associated to it (they share the same ID that allows the match). In case the transfer doesn’t work due to a broadcast system problem, there is no use to panic since you can manually upload the audio file thanks to the module ScalD.

Managing media content with ScalD

Our core online activity is to manage media. We searched for solutions with Open Web Solutions and based our work on early developments made by Chicago Technology Cooperative on the ScalD module. ScalD is a media library which allows to manipulate various types of media (audio, image, video) : users can specify licensing on their uploaded media, re-use it for themselves, offer it to others for re-use and track all of those interactions without interfering with any other Drupal functionality. As a cross-browser, AJAX-enabled media library, SCALD allows users to upload images, audio clips, video files, and media from 3rd party sites like YouTube into an online WYSIWYG editor with a drag-and-drop interface.

Scald can be used in every type of content. If you want to write an article and illustrate your point with an image, you just have to look into the scald on the right side of your page, choose your image thanks to the scald search function and drag and drop it into the WYSIWYG. It’s the same process for audio or a video files. Thus, you have access to all the media stored in the library wherever you are working in the back office. Isn’t it great ? Our web-editors are very fond of scald: “it’s very easy to get an image or video. We couldn’t dream of a simpler way to add a media to our contents ”

We’ll keep you informed of our improvements soon !