Sector(s)
Project Team
Big thanks to Christian, Patrick, Andre, Marouan, Marcel, EA and Boris.
Radio Regenbogen is one of the most popular radio stations in the southwest of Germany. With a range of up to 5 million listeners the site performance was one of the key factors for the successful relaunch of the website.
The challenge was to create a modern and user-friendly news portal - combined with a broad range of audio contents. All contents including the music streams should be accessible on all devices: Desktops, Tablets and Smartphones. The goal was to create a modern multi-channel experience for the radio station listeners, enhanced with online articles and audio as well as social media integration.
We had about 3 month from project start until the fixed launch date. A tough deadline for a project with an estimated amount of 150 days of work.
About the project
Audio and streaming
For a radio station, audio content is the most important media to use on a website. And with new competitors like Spotify, last.fm or Deezer it is getting most important to offer more than a traditional radio program. Aside the live stream of the traditional VHF frequency, a broad range of additional streaming channels for different moods and flavors is provided. All of them are accessible with a modern HTML5 audio player, usable with nearly all devices from all manufacturers - with stationary and mobile internet connections.
The editors can use audio also in articles - as well as any other media as images or videos. Audio files are simply uploaded within Drupal and then seamlessly integrated into the article - using the same high-quality HTML5 audio player as for the live streaming.
Generation of user traffic
Another key point in the website's strategy is the focus on high quality regional and international content, like news, guides, reports, sports or celebrities. It generates a lot of organic search engine traffic - also because it was managed to list the websites news section within the Google news search index.
Every single article can be shared within social media websites and uses the Facebook comments widget to integrate user interactions on the website. One advantage is the simple and quick implementation of the Facebook comment widget.
The visitors generated trough Google organic search and Social media interactions then generates also music stream listeners - the primary goal of the website.
Thus, features like Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles or the listing in Google News index where mandatory for the success of the site.
Connections to third-party systems
Beside rather simple interfaces / APIs to e.g. webcams or weather forecasts we also integrated other more complex connections: Traffic information is imported via XML-files and then visualized using Google Maps to show exactly where the traffic jam is.
More challenging was the connection to the radio station sender system. At first, this delivers all the audio streams integrated into the audio players. Additional it allows us to provide playlist information on the website - what is actually playing? What was playing one hour ago? Finally, we do also get the CD covers from this service.
Radio Regenbogen is using Facebook events to provide information about their events and roadshows. Since there was no suitable Drupal plugin available, we created a plugin on our own which imports all the data and displays them on the website.
Currently we improving our custom built Facebook event module to contribute it later in the Drupal community.
What all connections and interfaces have in common: In such a high-performance scenario we couldn't load all data from third-party systems on demand for every user. Therefore all interfaces and plugins make heavy usage of data buffering and caching mechanisms.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal offers easy and powerful options to add custom plugins and interfaces to make the best tailor-made website for the customer. This was important to connect to the different APIs and systems required in this case. Additional, the flexible and intuitive user interface empowers the editor team to publish quickly news - which sometimes is required to happen within minutes. The very good possibilities to do SEO and the long maintenance support were other reasons why we finally chose Drupal as the best CMS for regenbogen.de.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Metatags, Pathauto and XMLSitemap were used to provide full control for editors and developers to optimize and use all the websites SEO capabilities.
To leverage site performance we used Redis, CDN and Image info Cache. Also, those plugins provide Drush integration, which is one of our main tools to handle deployment processes, automate processes and optimize teamwork. Together with Features plugin, Drush helps us heavily to have a smooth, stable and quick development and deployment process.
Since the editor team needs to work often and intensively with the system we decided to integrate Entityreference, Metatag, Pathauto, Scald and WYSIWYG to improve possibilities, usability and comfort for them.
