Drupal 8 in Large Media Production Environments

Drupal 8 marks a major step forward in Drupal’s capabilities, especially in its ability to integrate into complex environments composed of several systems working in concert.  This presentation will show how IfThen has incorporated Drupal 8 into complex media publishing environments where Drupal is a peer among many cooperating systems.  The presentation will briefly review the digital media publishing value chain including both a functional decomposition and specific technical expressions of the functional components with Drupal in the central CMS role as both a consumer and a provider.  Third party components include content distribution, ad integrations, video encoding and VMS systems, wire and third party data feeds, social, analytics, third party taxonomy services, search, OAUTH & SAML authentication, and content subscriptions (paywalls).  In addition, issues related to internationalization and translation services will also be highlighted.

This session will use both abstract functional diagrams to illustrate how Drupal fits into the media company value chain and ecosystem, as well as a walkthrough of the integrations points with other functional components, with specific examples of third party integration mechanisms.  In addition, the talk will feature examples of specific implementations we have performed, and especially our implementation at National Geographic.

This discussion is aimed at technical architects, CTOs, and backend developers with an interest in large, complex Drupal installations with multiple third party integrations and complex workflows.  Those working in digital media will be particularly interested in this presentation.