all right so good morning again everyone this is ourselves this is the video city from T next his project manager leaving the implementation for the project for Al Arabiya net my name is Carrie Morgan I'm heading the development team internally in Al Arabiya and we're gonna walk you through the presentation today just to give you a brief overview about the agenda today we're gonna start by talking a little bit about Al Arabiya news channel and a larvae dog net in general as a company the rationale for this project why you chose Magnolia and then basically the focusing on our core business which is a test article publishing and then finally we're gonna wrap up with some key achievements and a few takeaways so I just wanted to start by showing you a quick video that's what the sound works vo lady so this is basically us al-arabiya basically the primary business of al-arabiya is a news channel we deliver news to people around the Middle East we are the number one news provider when it comes to TV in the Middle East we currently have two channels that work around the clock 24/7 covering news mostly in the Middle East but also from all around the world especially most important events we have teams working 24/7 whether it's on the TV itself or in the online business when we go to the web we do have a very strong presence on the web in fact we are the strongest news website in the Middle East we have a structure of four languages Arabic English Bordeaux and Farsi covering mostly most of the languages spoken in in this area besides every site comprises of more than 30 sections we have monthly site visits visitors about 70 million visits visitors every month during peak times and about 120 225 million pageviews which is a very impressive number again peak traffic we've seen big traffic reaches to about 20,000 concurrent users being on the site at the same time we have over 160,000 web pages inside the CMS and we have for years was working around the clock on putting this content into the CMS publishing about 200 articles every day now so let me talk a little bit about what we wanted to do with that project what the real motive behind the project the project was not to redesign the site the project was simply to replace the infrastructure with a more stable CMS a reason being is I'll backtrack a little bit to the back about five to six years ago we had a homegrown CMS that we just started with about three developers maintaining the CMS on a continuous basis a lot of issues with the CMS when he first started publishing the articles was extremely not reliable new sections in order for you guys to develop a new section it required two days of development so editors will be sitting there for a developer to finish the section and then they will start doing the work the content was not structured and standardized at all because we had multiple developers in and out of the team throughout the years which means that the code was not standardized storage or not standardized and the content was not looking the same it gave us actually a very hard time doing the migration of the archived articles there was no workbook no concept of work whatsoever which is something that we definitely needed to happen we had some performance issues on the CMS the CMS would go down the site was not scalable at all just because of the limitation of the infrastructure and the the code base that was built on and there was no way of doing syndication of the content content resides not a single source we had multiple sources for the content and we couldn't achieve having a single source for force indicating our content to our other platforms and the last point is basically security because the code base was not strong enough we had we were very prone to security attacks and being the biggest news channel in the Middle East we were always under attack constantly so that's basically the needs so we needed a CMS that can cope with the high traffic loads that we have we needed the CMS that achieves the editorial needs in terms of fast publishing and in terms of having sections created literally in a matter of minutes and forever just to be able to put content in these sections we needed a system to be able to easy integrate with all our other infrastructures and platforms whether its internal or external and internal meaning that we get content that gets syndicated from TV from our TV channels like for example the breaking news news tickers and even articles we're working right now on on managing to get content created from TV directly dumped into the CMS and published dynamically on the web and of course we needed a system that can protect us against DDoS attacks or security in general and Magnolia achieved all of these in a very good extent scalability was definitely a key point in Magnolia and that was one of the key features while you pick magnolias was open-source so highly customizable so even if it doesn't come out of the box and achieves exactly what you want you can definitely make it happen through customization it gave us flexibility to do seamless integrations without external systems as well as internal systems where we get the other content from and it had a very clear separation between the author instances and the public nodes which basically means that even if the site is under attack the CMS is still working it's still functional and the content is preserved and also helped us in determining the same plans so I'm going to give it to Davide right now he's going to talk a little bit about fast article publishing which is a key presentation Thank You kami and hi everybody it goes without saying that being an online news room al-arabiya needed definitely a way to publish article very quickly hmm so the key challenge of the project was fast article publishing and that's the main topic of this presentation what I will be showing to you is how we customized Magnolias to achieve this objective and to meet our be a requirement of publishing entering and publishing articles into the system Infinite's basically there were a few more challenges in the project because as you can imagine being an online newsroom entails that you have journalists and not webmasters entering articles within the system so not technical people and neither people skilled or prepared to work in a web environment plus al-arabiya is structured in multiple newsrooms which are divided into are divided and are structured by a role by by languages I mention them and also by sections so you have a newsroom for sports for example in you have a newsroom for business this is another another complexity plus again being a TV channel you have a lot of content coming from the TV system so being a videos or for example infographics or in images all these challenges had to be tackled and had to be sorted out with the system in three minutes if you think about three minutes it is a very short amount of time it's more or less the time for a coffee I guess that's the wrong picture because three minutes is actually not the time for an American coffee but it's the time for an Italian coffee so a very short amount of time okay think about sipping that coffee in that time frame you have to perform all these activities and actually you are the only own to perform that activities because the newsroom as I told you before it's quite structure you have editorial team you have an editorial team you have a multimedia team and you have spell checkers so it's not only one person working on the same news but it's actually multiple people working on it basically the flow is like this news arrives in the newsroom is edited by a journalist images or videos are added to the news and other people we've used the text another person reviews the text and there is somebody who decides where the news has to go within the website in which section and in which position within that section in some occasions you need that an editor-in-chief approves that news and gives the green light for publishing it then the news is finally online but it has to keep up to date during during the day and as the story evolves this process as you many understand is not that linear as I draw it on this slide and all these things have to happen in just three minutes it was also almost impossible with the standard CMS implementation being it Magnolia or whatever we have we had an int on how to do this while arriving at our BIA because this is the claim they have on their building we see hope everywhere and we so hope in doing and tackling this challenge so we so hope in there and we started working on it we started working on it by first identifying the areas where the product can be improved we knew that Magnolia was and actually is highly customizable so basically why we identified these four areas of improvement in which we actually did some something with the CMS changed the code to meet the actual needs of the client the first area of improvement is given by the fact that Magnolia has three different repositories I'm sorry to talk about represented I would better talk about environments an editor can enter Magnolia and change content in one environment add multimedia stuff and material in another environment the DMS and work with the workflow by approving or rejecting it in a different environment if you think about it it takes much and much time for editors and users to access this these three different environments so what we did basically was putting everything together and we did this by building a custom dashboard users CMS users and basically editors are not using separate environments but are using only one environment which is this dashboard in this dashboard editors can see all the articles that are published within the CMS and can see the actual status for example of the workflow they can directly publish and activate content from that dashboard they can also upload files directly from that dashboard and editors are also loud to upload content while actually writing the articles so upload multimedia files while actually writing the article that was very useful and that's the way we managed to put all the three environments together as I was telling you before there is a way to upload directly content by simply dragging and dropping in this view while writing the article editors are also asked to add metadata to the images and videos which are added and to adjust by manual cropping or resize these images according to the variations which are managed through throughout the website another thing that we put together in this dashboard and in the article editing process in a publication flow first of all we are using a single step publication so the articles are going alive just after clicking the publish button but in the dashboard editors can see the actual status of the workflow not only for the publication but also for the status of the other processes of article article editing being that an editor adding text multimedia somebody in the multimedia team adding images or videos or somebody from the spellcheckers actually revising the article second area of improvement believe it or not is inline editing is the editing inline editing is a wonderful feature it's very straightforward for users it allows them to create multiple content and to arrange it into the page by simply dragging and dropping something adding images moving them around the page they can editors can open up multiple windows but if you if you think about optimizing the timing of writing an article well inline editing can be a problem can be a problem a problem because it entails a nonlinear way of working which is not efficient the way we sorted out is as is through the introduction of a semi guided process basically we added a custom form which asked simply editors to enter a few fields being then section title and the short short description of the article and the image and right after pub right after entering this information within the system through this form the article can be published all this information are the basic information that which are added and entered into the system which are needed for the article to be in published online in a second step when a story develops for example the inline editing feature is still used by editors with this feature that can add more images add more videos photo galleries audio files and stuff like that and they can play around with with different components within the page third challenge articles need to be featured in multiple sections articles need to appear in multiple sections as you know Magnolia is organizing content in a very efficient way by using hierarchies you probably heard about these in some other presentations some years ago here the Magnolia conference we kind of built on it and adopted the same approach by storing content under under the same under single node and then retrieving it in different sections the new thing is that editors are not even aware of what it's happening under the hood they just need to select which section they want there the article to belong and the position of this article they can assign multiple sections of course there is always a main section which is the one used for the canonical URLs so we did extensive usage of canonical URLs not to have content duplicated on the search engines and when you are accessing that news from a very specific part or portion of the website that news is inheriting the context of the section it belongs to last area of improvement is the workflow as you know Magnolia is a very linear workflow but as I told you before we have multiple roles within the newsroom plus the workflow is not definitely not linear actually there is nothing linear in the movie so either an editor or a movie or somebody of the multimedia team can start article creation by for example adding a video or adding a text and then pass it to another colleague who has either video or text or to another author a spell checker but stamps some steps are not required for example engange and can be skipped when a news is very urgent for example we introduced this workflow and we introduced also a way of notifying user by is by adding some pop-up notification and creating a custom notification dashboard we are running on Magnolia 4.4 today right so the pulse feature was not there because it's something coming with Magnolia 5 in in in this specific area probably the pulse would have been something very useful to do this but for this project what we did is introducing a notification and creating a custom notification - Pro Plus you still and you can still see in the dashboard the status of each article for example if this spell-checking has been done if multimedia material has been added to the article or if the text has been rather written right so kind of wrapping up with the key achievements on the project we definitely achieve the targets for the project articles are created in less than three minutes for sure in the majority of the cases actually in a lot of cases the articles are created within 30 seconds because we can just publish an article with a simple title description in just an image and that's something that we can definitely get achieved in less than 30 seconds of course working with Magnolia and optimize HTML on CDN caching we can get the article live within less than one minute for everybody to see on the on the public nodes and across the city ends article creation is a very simple two-step process it was a much longer process before that and actually we're working on enhancing this even further right now to make it even a one-step process which is something that dilatory will definitely appreciate creation of sections has become a something extremely seamless and extremely quick a lot of times it will take somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes including adding all the components on different sections and pointing the content dynamically from the content pool editors are very happy with this because they can immediately start assigning the articles to that newly created section as soon as the section appears the implementation of 10-x on this project was very impressive we have seen extremely amazing load times on the website pages most of the pages load two to three times faster than it used to be before the project was completed in about 11 months and then we had a little bit of change requests changing some architectural component to isolate some of our infrastructure to make sure that it's secure enough right now I don't know if people believe me or not but we're running on to public notes that's how optimal our infrastructure is everything is very highly optimized we're using a very minimal amount of resources and it's very efficient we have two external repositories for the videos and the images and so far we had 100% CMS uptime this is just to show you that we are telling the truth this is the Google Analytics right now number of this is the number of people actually on the website at the time of switch from the old to the new CMS we did this at the lowest peak at night so you can still see almost well 3.5 thousand users on the website at the lowest peak that's an impressive amount of traffic and of course after the hard work this is a tribute of our guys our developers which really did a good job and after our work we need some rest a few takeaways from this presentation I have a bad news for you the bad news is that there is no product which is right for you you always will need customizations but the good news is that if you choose an open-source product or a product that you can customize well that will be a nice move and if you choose magnolia well it will be very easy to customize and to tailor the product to suit your specific needs so this is the first take away second one after you choose the product you have to select the right partner a partner that actually knows how to do things and a partner with a lot of experience in customizing that product plus I wanted to add something which is also related to the keynote of this morning and I would like to invite you to adopt a Best of Breed approach Magnolia is a wonderful CMS and I would like to suggest you to choose the right CMS and to take the best CMS on the market and then integrate it with the best product in their specific field so if you already have a DM if you already have a CRM if you're already using Omniture for example or Google Analytics if you already have an eShop take a product that can integrate all these tools don't buy a black box basically otherwise you'll be stuck with that black box and you will not be able to integrate everything in with the CMS CMS is managing content basically and you need it to manage content but for some specific areas like shops like analytics like newsletter into I've learned really from these guys these guys are really taking the best cherries and picking the the best tools on the market and trying to integrate them we did this you did this with well with the infrastructure infrastructure you did this with the newsletter into for example and with the da m you are always in search of the perfect tool and the best tool to have it that's all for our presentation we are here if you have questions thank you