New Publishing System For Motoring Journalists

Last week we were very busy supporting a new system in its first week of live production use. We're pleased to say the launch was a roaring success. Just about as smooth as the launch of a complicated article publishing system could be.

First, some background. Trinity Mirror Group, the UK publishing giant, have always had a core of journalists within their organisation responsible for the creation of motoring content - anything about cars, motorcycles, vans, trucks, etc. These journalists were moving to a separate company, Driving Force, which was taking over the delivery of the majority of motoring content to all of Trinity Mirror Group's newspapers. But there was a problem. Traditionally these journalists used a system integrated with Trinity Mirror's corporate intranet. As Driving Force separated from Trinity Mirror, it was imperative they had their own publishing system. That's where we came in. Back in 2009 we started building the new Drupal-based article delivery system and last week we launched it.

Business critical? Enterprise? It doesn't get much more business critical than this. This system, via Trinity Mirror's aggregation, is now the primary source of motoring news for the majority of the UK's large regional newspapers, and Driving Force intend to go much further. This system is where their journalists enter their content, where it is edited and sub-edited, where newspapers come to select which pieces they want to incorporate in to their own websites and newspapers (including download of high-resolution, print-ready graphics, videos and Word versions of press articles).

And on the back end we have a web services driven API handing articles off to newspapers so they can automatically syndicate the articles they wish. All this is, of course, access restricted by content license agreements held with Driving Force. And it's also delivered in the NITF format, using a Views module extension which we published back to Drupal.org and is now co-maintained by a developer the Economist, another of our clients.

Such is the power of Drupal, Views, Services, Organic Groups and Drupal's inbuilt Taxonomy. We'll post a showcase with more details in the coming days. If you have similar business needs, give us a call. We've done it more than once now and are happy to provide references.