so I'm going to talk about Magnolia Amelia obviously as it says on the slide my name is Adrian bloom I work for MBC group and before I actually get into this presentation I'm always trying to sort of understand what my audience is like and I'm using two slides to calibrate on what the audience is like just to see the reactions so for the first one if everybody could just read this and then if anybody who would absolutely quit his job is if this wave their boss would raise their hand please just read it and if you think this is something you could live with in your job then it's fine but if you think this would make you hate your job let me know yes of course okay and the other one is completely different cyanide and Happiness just read it for a second and let me know just raise your hand if you think it's even slightly funny yeah okay right but give me a sort of an idea of what people I'm dealing with as well the the difficult thing for me is always that I find both things interesting and funny but sort of in between ish so to get back to why I'm actually going to talk here NBC MC group is a broadcaster in the Middle East it was founded originally in London in 1991 and it's mostly covering Saudi Arabia the Gulf countries but we have a large audience in all of the Arabic countries it's in fact the largest broadcasting company in the Middle East and depending on who you ask and when exactly it's about 165 million which means its audience was about as big as some of the large American channels we have of course not just one channel but by now about ten I think soon it will be 11 and 12 we have a couple of radio stations and of course the reason I'm here is we have a very large online presence and we have a lot of mobile applications as well just the different channels we have these are the channels we have on our mobile app these are just some of the different channels we have so if we had me see one which he actually can get on cable in Europe as well but we also have an actual channel we have and we see three foot and four kids and a bunch of other things we also have a news channel which is other obeah this is me standing in the studio of all our beer but just to make it completely clear the weird thing about how and we see groups set up is that lrb is part of us but it's also very separate so basically I'm not talking about other a beer today if you want to hear more about Al Arabiya because they're also implementing Magnolia right now way they are in the back there's cream and aslam and they are doing LR beer and I think elsewhere in the audience we have people from 10x who are working yeah they're working with them on the implementation but I'm going to completely ignore this so the kind of programs we have on NBC it's not all guys in white dresses sitting around talking though we have a lot of that but we also have various other programs guys what's the name of this program again I can never pronounce this so we have a program like this we also have for instance and this is actually the only reason I brought this one up is because it's a show in Arabic that has English subtitles and you can actually watch it online it's about 4 guys in the 20s and are moving to Dubai and their lives and times of course we have a lot of the regular programming one of the things I was looking forward to moving to the Middle East was not having to deal with things like idols which we have or cocktail and which we also have next month we are starting the voice of Arabia so we have a huge mix of also just Western programming with subtitles we have formats that everybody else knows and we have our own shows and of course we have so many channels that we have enough time to fill if I'm looking at online then we have MBC table net which is basically an entertainment portal but it's also home of all of the channels and program microsites so every program has their own micro sites and all channels after own sites then we also have Shahed which is our video on demand where you can catch up which shows you can see all of the episodes of the different shows and we have a bunch of other things that the list is too long to to completely go through it is and we have the world wrestling Arabia version we have two action channel we have a choke and shopping channel we currently have about nine different mobile applications which are usually popular we recently launched the Shahed mobile application so there's the video on demand on iPad and it in the first month and I have got 500,000 downloads so and we're now also moving into connected devices so Smart TVs and of these small cable boxes the organization of online we actually have depending on you know how you count between 100 and 140 people working in online across three offices so we have the head offices in Dubai and we have a large editorial team in Cairo and most of the development and design is now moving to our office in Jordan in Amman if we look at the exact audience of our online this is taken straight from Google Analytics so it's a little bit vague as you can see the majority is in Saudi Arabia then the the there's a lot of the rest of the Middle East but surprisingly it's pretty much the whole world everybody who's an Arabic speaker will tune in to our websites so the US for instance is large audience for us and most European countries have actually high up on a list as well so if I'm then switching to the actual content management of all of this you can imagine that with this kind of background and of course we walk around feeling we are the most important broadcasters in Middle East so the previous CMS was chosen based on that kind of thinking and basically what we ended up with was very similar to something like this sort of a stretch Hummer it's big it's American it's luxurious and it's very expensive so it must be awesome and these are the kind of things they're sort of nice to watch from a distance you don't actually want to drive these to the office every day so when we started looking at the actual CMS and the issues after a couple of years you start running into more and more problems and the system was pretty much unstable though by the time we started actually replacing it especially as LOM managed to almost get it under under control the implementation from the beginning had been quite chaotic and then redone slightly and was also getting slightly more organized but was never going to be a very clean implementation for all of the the microsites for all of these shows there was a lot of developer involvement for just setting up new structures in the website so taking too long to actually go live with these microsites and you have a new program and typically you'll have the people responsible for the program two days before tell you oh by the way there's this new program we're going to air tomorrow can you do a quick website so that's a bit of a problem and with that we also had a lot of maintenance costs just from the software vendor themselves but also just in getting a extra resources and finding qualified resources for an American CMS in the Middle East was pretty pretty hard so then looking at the solution for this obviously at a very high level is improved the technical side and improved the organization around it and this is actually where I started getting involved as an outsider and bagdana was still working for CMS worch which is now called real story group and we went through an RFP based on scenarios of what we actually wanted to do online how editorial has to work with a system and actually the tasks they want to achieve and based on that looked at different combinations of vendors and integrators and set through hours and hours of demos and I think here this is how we really got to know Pascale very well because he was the only one that kept us awake for at least three hours in many other cases that was a challenge and after going through this list and all of these demos we decided to do an actual proof concept with two systems and try to put them on the load but also try to implement some of the things we had identified as scenarios and just see how far you could get with this in one month of course we had no illusion that we would do the complete implementation as a proof-of-concept but just seeing how it would be to work with these integrators and vendors so after our hummer what we basically ended up with and trust me that our directors were actually thinking of it that in this way this was a combination we ended up with and this is how it was fought off it's like Magnolia is Swiss engineering it's precision engineered this is great and then we get a German company to do the implementation so that's that's the best engineering combination you could possibly get if it's one of those things that looks and sounds really nice but of course the challenge then becomes living up to this and so far it's actually proven to be quite like this some of the reasons why we ended up with Magnolia is of course that it's open source but open source in itself is not a reason to pick something I mean I don't really care if it's open source a closed source in itself that's just a legal thing but the reason for Magnolia is especially that there's a vibrant community around it which is on a date and like today you can tell why we decided that this was a good thing there's actually documentation and a lot of resources to be found on this and the nice thing of course it's an actual system you can look into the core of the functionality as you can see the code you can see how it's been built you can understand how it's been built and you can change it apart from that compared to some of the other open-source systems I think we know there's quite mature and is using a couple of technologies that in this combination of have proven themselves over the past few years and this was confirmed in our proof of concept so it was compared to the other system it the other system was having a very hard time with the tasks we were setting for it and just measuring that and the load on the server's compared to Magnolia was a world of difference apart from that of course on the scenarios we said it was a relatively good match it wasn't perfect and I think that's sort of the point because you don't want to go into things thinking they are perfect like Dubai is it's always somewhere it's always hot and that there's no clouds there's no rain but this is the Burj Khalifa with a sandstorm brewing behind it so if you ignore this you are really in trouble and this is actually sort of one of those things where a lot of people if you don't if you've never been to Dubai you don't really know what it's like so one of the things that a lot of people are now talking to me about is have you seen Mission Impossible and I go well yes but it was completely wrong like this kind of sandstorm that you have a Mission Impossible you see this wall sand coming up we don't have that we have a lot of dust being kicked up and stuff like that and Tom Cruise is sitting on I think one hundred and twentieth floor in hotel in the hotel and he goes up to the eighth floor so everything you see a mission impossible is wrong the reality of it is that Dubai is much weirder than Mission Impossible because what Dubai is in fact is something like this this is me visiting the Penguins in Ski Dubai that's really nicely then these are the king penguins and you can sit there you can actually pet them and they're really nice and soft I didn't realize that before it's slightly surreal being in a desert in 50 degrees walking inside putting on a coat and sitting next to the Penguins so anyway you don't ignore the problems that come with a system you want to know about these problems before you actually start with it because then you can anticipate what the problems are you can start doing things to mitigate the problems or you can still start building things around it the main problem for us was not the fact that Arabic is from right to left this is not what an Arabic website looks like in Arabic it's not likely simply mirror things and you actually have a strange mix of things that are still on the right because everybody is used to seeing these things on the right whereas you would think if you just mirror it it would be on the other side we did have some issues with some of the SDK components not adapting well to the different direction we spend a couple of weeks getting the the sliders to slide in the right direction for instance but does those issues were actually relatively minor like getting the Arabic into the system and getting the actual type into the system wasn't the main problem the main problem actually about Magnolia and if I'm going to tell you about this you have to remember that back then Magnolia f5 was sort of like this fara Morgana and the desert it's one of those things like there's the promise it's going to be there but you don't know how long it's going to take if you're going to start walking so the sensible thing was not to already start using it as if Magnolia 5 would be the solution to all the problems but basically if you're talking about Magnolia you're talking about the arch typical classic 3 of a website and you just water that tree and then it grows more leaves and basically you end up with a bunch of leaves and they are at a very specific point in the website so leave is always attached to one branch not to 20 it's attached to one whereas the reality of modern websites of course is that it's more like a sphere this is actually a graph somebody made out of Wikipedia of the main topics and then how they connect to each other and how the inter links are so this is not a Content tree and there's not it's not a matter of having leaves in here it's more sort of like reuse of the same stuff over and over again and you actually want to avoid all of them looking the same because apparently this is a bad idea to have too many of the same but you do want to be able to use and multiply the same thing and use it in various settings so if we're talking about without ignoring the weaknesses implementing Magnolia two main issues is that its page based and it takes a lot of clicks to actually publish something what I mean by page based is this is of course the basic interface you have the page you have the paragraphs on the page by the way I think the terminology of paragraphs is slowly starting to fade away which is great because the first presentation we had we were talking about paragraphs and Pascal was talking about paragraphs and how paragraphs are in the page and our designer was going yes of course the paragraphs are in the page because you started with a P tag and no not that kind of paragraphs there are different paragraphs but anyway these components are on the page and of course you added these components through these dialogues and then modeling stuff a Magnolia this is the one I've taken this directly from the documentation on the site this scheme of things always makes me feel really stupid like I shouldn't really be in content management because I don't really get how this fits together and how this fits together with the actual system I've looked at it many many times and I still really don't understand what this has to do with the content management and modeling the content but again that's probably just my fault so if people will would be so kind to explain me after this then I would be very grateful in the meantime the way I like to think of column management ideally if it would just be a very abstract system I would start from a Content model I would then just have the content and the content all defines the structure of the content you combine these and you end up with very specific content items then as soon as you want to use these content items you just add a specific format or a template and which is going to structure it into HTML whatever output format you want and that's what creates a specific type of presentation and of course instead of stars you could use hearts or flowers or whatever and then you get different presentations of the same content which is modeled according to the same content apparently in a lot of discussions I've had with Magnolia and also with a pear term this is not entirely the way that Magnolia is thinking about this but again this is one of those ongoing discussions and if people would like to discuss with me what the difference is between this and this and explain it to me I'd be very happy in the meantime the upshot is basically that Magnolia is great for creating pages and it's very very nice to create these beautiful pages of course it would be something like this and you wouldn't be color.i reading on this because it's one page so that's not a good idea and you probably would have liked this screen thing there and you would be able to edit this teaser that's quite different from the reality of a large media site with a huge amount of articles being published by under editorial staff basically what we need is an article publishing machine we have to keep rolling out articles and they have to just be published and published and published and published so if you compare that again to having a website tree with pages which is an edit that doesn't really match that but of course it's open source it's extendable and if you have a good integrator you can actually go okay so this doesn't really match what we want to do so why not add custom modules to this so all you came up with with aparato is what we call the content pool unless it has a nice icon of a pool which I don't know who picked this but it doesn't make an yep if it doesn't really make any sense either but so we have this small icon of a pool because it's a pool of content and in this content pool we have placed this are articles which is somewhat similar to what the guys were demonstrating earlier Magnolias five way of these these contacts which are an app within Magnolia so all of our articles are places they don't have a distinct place in a tree they're just articles and the way you make them visible in a tree is by associating to them to specific areas and Inter entry and the problem of family having too many clicks we solved by having a streamlined interface again when only a five we phone is seeing it really today but we needed this last year so what it looks like in in reality is that we have this custom module which is built in GWT again built by by aparato anybody has any very specific questions on how this works on a technical level and how this hooks into the JCR etc go to York because is one who actually did all the architecture for this but the important thing to us is that we now just have articles you create new articles and the articles have specific fields so an article has a title it has an author it has a summary it has an image it has tags and categories etc that's basically all editors do they create these articles and instead of having to open multiple dialogues and clicking them away again and doing all these things in different screens all of the things they have to do are basically in this one screen so they don't have to move away from this screen all of the functions they need are here and I just have to fill it out scroll down and save it and activate it then on the pages itself and this is from from our test site so the content isn't really very relevant and I have to admit that I am starting to get slightly bored with Oprah because it's in all of our test sites but what we have in the sites are actually sort of the cues that take articles from the content pool based on for instance the categories that these articles have or on specific keywords so what you define on the page is this is going to display all the content that has these categories instead of attaching it literally etc the dialog for actually changing these sort of cues therefore has fields like the categories interests acts editorial tags and these are going to define which articles are going to show up in this specific component the upshot of this is that if you look at the page based Magnolias then it's not so much that we have components like this but it's basically the combination of having in each a printing press because each of these components on our pages is now a dynamic list of come of Oracle's being displayed there or to go back to the original page of course with the preview bar on top of it we still want to have those very nice pages because it's a media site and these pages have to new look really nice to visitors that come to our website because they expect fleshie new stuff about Arab idol and they expect to read articles about the last year's winner and how she had a party for her birthday so it has to look very nice and fleshy but in the meantime we just won those article publishing machines rolling and keeping that kind of content going in the end what this looks like in reality is this is the actual homepage we currently have - the slider which is above this and the logos that are above this and even though this is an Arabic I think this will make some sense after my explanation behind it the component you see in the bottom here to the right is what we call the content stream which we were able to develop on top of our implementation and these are tabs that actually have things like news and sports and they aggregate news and sports and entertainment from everywhere in our website so whenever there's a microsite that is talking about sports and has an article about sports it's also going to show up in one of these tabs items on this page and all of these keeps updating at a regular interval at the same time in this page there's a couple of components which an editor will actually manually say okay this is so important I want to highlight something here the slider that is above this will actually be edited by an editor who is going to say I will put this picture here and this needs to be a promotion for the next week and so it's a huge blend of both regular magnolia which is quite page base combined with our custom development which is the place - this content which flows through the whole site in all these different streams and to wrap this up actually I would then go back to the old slogan of Magnolia which is actually nice and straightforward and simple is beautiful sounds great and to an extent it is and I can understand what I've changed it because if we think of Magnolia is sort of this great Swiss engineering in this nice Swiss watch the nice thing also is that it's some kind of watch where you can actually see the insights and you can make modifications and you have to go and can have to customization and that's it for me for now anybody have any questions on this thank you you said you had to I'm not sure if you had to software vendors and to implementers or was it you decide for Magnolia and let them be together we actually started out with eighth combinations of vendors and integrators which is already very telling because two of these showed up without an integrator and then try to tell us no no no there's a bunch of companies that can do this for us and can work with you they just somehow couldn't make it to this meeting or the next one or the one after and so we ended up with two combinations so we had one CMAs & integrator and another CMAs integrator okay thank you you mentioned you have about 100 editors distributed along the different countries how many articles do they publish another each day that's a very good question and an i up on our wish list for new features is better reporting on how much they are actually publishing so if you could build this for us then I'd be very happy and did you have any performance problems with your dynamic articles or did you have to implement some sort of caching that articles on a scale we're running this we of course have a lot of performance issues it was from the beginning I think better than the previous system we had but we have to invest a lot of time and effort in scaling this of course the nice thing about a site on this scale both geographically and an amount of visitors we get is this is an ongoing thing so we're constantly working on on scaling and the exact way that the caching is fitting into this and it's actually one of the things that tomorrow again we're going to have a large discussion on how to improve these things the the most important thing I think so far has been for us that we'd always have this scaling problem with any kind of system but we're now working with people who she understand the problems come up with different solutions and are working with us to solve this which is I think the key thing I find it very interesting that you're having the same problem as others have as soon as you start with a bunch of information and try to put it into a tree it works and after a while if you have hundreds and thousands of entities then you start to think of a new concept to access this information with tax or buzzwords or whatever to find the right subset of information which fits to your actual current environment where you are so it's almost the same as we see in the document management systems because they also go away from from the tree as a as a concept for an organizational of the information entities I think in general there's still a huge tendency to think of a website as being pages and as soon as you start trying to create a mobile application from this you really run into this problem but a site like Wikipedia is not a tree because that's not a national and it's not a natural form for electronic information to be in a tree and it's sort of like the closest thing people could come up with from a book which is perfectly linear is we're going to go one dimension deeper and create trees and very quickly run into problems there and I think one of the the best things to do within Magnolia is to solve that problem as well if you want to move it beyond sites that are just a few dozen or a few hundred pages you have to find new ways of of organizing this okay thank you you