Digitalization has opened doors that nobody imagined even existed. Opportunities did not just come knocking, they exploded their way in. Digital evolution has taken the world of professional publishing by storm. However, this evolution brought along a whole new set of challenges that publishers are still trying to cope up with. Many publishers of physical magazines had to shut shop as most of their readers had now shifted to e-magazines but the ones who saw the silver lining in the cloud, went online! And now the whole world is their audience.
Consumers are altering their preferences of consuming content ever so often and publishers have to make sure they reach their audience through more than just one medium. Plain text is passé – content that’s not enriched with any media (images/videos/gifs) are blindly rejected.
As our attention-spans are evolving (for the worse), it has become crucial for content to be fresh, relevant, interactive and alluring. Which means, publishers need to work even faster and find efficient ways to exhibit their content for better consumer engagement. A good Content Management System will let publishers to create and publish fresh content fast and efficaciously. Thunder - a Drupal 8 distribution – aims to resolve the problems faced by professional publishers and make their lives much easier.
Feel the Thunder
Originally designed for and by Hubert Burda Media, Thunder was later released as an open-source software in 2016. This community-driven CMS is based on Drupal 8 and consists of varieties of hand-picked modules meant solely for the publishing sector. Because it is open-source and completely non-profit, a Thunder Coalition was shaped where publishers, industry partners, core team and developers share their code/modules/extensions. So everyone benefits from the coalition while giving back at the same time.
With Drupal 8 already providing a vast collection of modules that are valuable for professional publishers, it was the most obvious choice of CMS to backup Thunder. Custom modules developed for Thunder are also contributed back to the Drupal community which encourages a strong circle-of-life.
So why reinvent the wheel when you can just realign it? – Said Anthony J. D’Angelo. And with Thunder, you don’t even need to realign it most times.
Get launched – quick and easy
A Drupal distribution is a complete package that comprises of installation profiles, modules, themes, libraries that are industry-centric and easily downloadable. Thunder distribution is an all-in-one package focused on professional publishers that is stable, extremely scalable and customizable. It consists of all the bare-necessities needed for a publisher to get up and running in the market faster. Installation is easy and quick and allows you to set-up your website faster than you think. Because it is open-source and free, it cuts down development efforts helping you save on time and money!
The Out-of-the-box Experience
Unless you want a feature that is very specific and bespoke, you are good to go with the core features Thunder has to offer. Responsiveness comes out-of-the-box not only for site visitors but for the editors and administrators too. The Paragraph module lets you create, modify and play around with content. It lets you drag and drop content and multimedia making it really flexible and easy to create beautiful stories.
Scheduling your content to be published is as easy as 1-2-3! Modules like Media Entity and Entity Browser make media handling more effective. Content Lock comes handy especially when many editors work together. It lets an editor lock a node they are working on and notifies the other(s) that the content is being edited. When you want to instantly check if your content looks alright on different devices, use the Responsive Preview module.Embedding videos from Youtube or Vimeo just got easier with the Video Embed Field module.
The Extra-Ordinary Extras
The little extras are what makes the ordinary, extra-ordinary. Thunder provides some optional modules that promise to give professional publishers that extra boost. Have you seen those articles on your Facebook app that load up in a jiffy and makes you feel like you haven’t even left the app? Yes, I’m talking about Facebook Instant Articles. With this module, editors can easily add content from their Drupal website to Facebook and drastically reduce load time on mobile devices.
The Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) module lets you deliver content like text, images, videos, Instagram and Twitter cards in a flash. If you need to cover an event as it occurs, the LiveBlog feature is your best friend. When you want to add content like surveys, polls, quizzes or top 10 lists, the Riddle Interactive Content plugin is precious. The Nexx.tv video player integration allows efficient distribution and flexible streaming of videos across various platforms.
The Drupal Advantage
Being a free and open-source content management framework, Drupal was the most obvious choice and Hubert Burda Media had to look no further. They had already had a great experience with Drupal and the release of Drupal 8 just made things better. Core Drupal features like Menu Management, User Management, Taxonomy, RSS feeds, system administration and page layout customization helped Thunder in building a strong foundation. A foundation that has been further enhanced with many more publisher-centric modules.
The Drupal community is constantly evolving, thereby adding more features, beefing up security and giving you all the support you need. The Thunder and Drupal Community are so closely-knit, you can’t tell the difference. Thunder makes it easy for organizations to share their customized modules with other industry-partners and the Drupal community so everyone benefits from their contribution.
Thunder has been built for publishers by publishers and just cannot be ignored if you are a professional publisher. It addresses all the pain-points of a publisher and helps accelerate the process of getting to market. Top publishers like Marie Claire, BUNTE, ELLE, Playboy, InStyle and many more trust Thunder. “Don’t give to get. Give to inspire others to give”. This seems to be the thought motivating the Thunder Coalition and the Drupal community to share the power of innovation. The advantages of being open-source are abundant but the most significant is the fact that you can give back to the community. It is like this amazing cycle of life that runs on trust and goodwill.