Case Study
We were consulted to develop a platform that would be able to organise and manage content enriching ARTE's TV programmes. Hence PAPA ("Page Article Programmes ARTE") was born: an API-first, multilingual content hub developed using "headless" Drupal 8.
Arte - the Franco-German TV network and "The European Cultural Channel" - is a long-term client of ours. We have built different products for them during the last few years (see, for example, here and here).
The PAPA platform was built to improve the creation and organisation of many articles from the various ARTE TV programmes.
It facilitated and standardized the way ARTE's editors publish the articles (in different languages) on all ARTE's pages.
The PAPA platform was built to improve the creation and organisation of many articles from the various ARTE TV programmes. It facilitated and standardized the way ARTE's editors publish the articles (in different languages) on all ARTE's pages.
One of the challenges we faced was providing preview functionality for editors. Traditionally, Drupal powers both the editorial back-end and the preview functionality rendered by the front end into one system.
As we were not using Drupal's front-end capabilities, we had to be crafty. We opted for rendering ReactJS components within Drupal, using Drupal's built-in REST APIs to get a JSON view on draft content. This progressive approach worked well and gave editors the same flexibility they had gotten used to in the traditional CMS but rendered without the weight of Drupal.
Evolving for other REST API-based services in ARTE's world. The success of this headless approach led to an interest in integrating other existing ARTE services into PAPA to work in a similar way. Some of these went beyond simply serving information in the form of articles, even requiring user interaction.
Headless Drupal
React
Building rich multi-lingual articles using Drupal's paragraphs.
The content structure of PAPA is built using Drupal's paragraphs. Every article on the platform, in essence, is a combination of rich text, quotes, social media posts, images and video and can be published in as many languages as they will require, now and in the future.
One of the challenges we faced was to provide preview functionality for editors. Traditionally, Drupal powers both the editorial back-end and the preview functionality rendered by the front end into one system. As we were not using Drupal's front-end capabilities, we had to be crafty.
We opted for rendering ReactJS components within Drupal, using Drupal's built-in REST APIs to get a JSON view on draft content. This progressive approach worked well and gave editors the same flexibility they had gotten used to in the traditional CMS but rendered without the weight of Drupal.
Evolving for other REST API-based services in ARTE's world. The success of this headless approach led to an interest in integrating other existing ARTE services into PAPA to work in a similar way. Some of these went beyond simply serving information in the form of articles, even requiring user interaction.
What have they achieved after our intervention?
The PAPA platform was built to improve the creation and organisation of the huge amount of articles from the various ARTE TV programmes. It facilitated and standardized the way ARTE's editors publish the articles (in different languages) on all ARTE's pages.
The Headless CMS approach allowed us to organize and compartmentalize the various levels of implementation work.
