Magazine Portal For A Leading Publishing House

Case Study

Magazine Portal For A Leading Publishing House

Client

The client is India’s leading consumer magazine group with top-line publications like Stardust, Savvy, Society, Health & Nutrition, Showtime, Society Interiors, Savvy Cookbook and Citadel. The company also has a Books division and has branched out into retailing with the Book Gallery and the Nutrition Centre.

Executive Summary

Client had an existing CMS backed portal running on Drupal. They had usability and content related issues and so they opted for a complete re-write of the CMS and the portal. The portal has to showcase 7 magazines published by the client.
Magazines covered by the portal are as follows:

  • Stardust
  • Society
  • Savvy
  • Showtime
  • Health
  • Interiors
  • Cookbook

Technology

  • PHP 4.x
  • Joomla 1.0.12 CMS
  • MySQL

Solution

  • Joomla core was customized for enabling all the functionalities needed.
  • Various components, modules, and plugins were written on top of the customized Joomla to maintain modularization and the plug n play architecture of Joomla.
  • The editorial teams of all magazines publish content specific to their magazines, which is published after the content passes through the designated workflow.
  • Customize the modules as and when the requirement changes.

Challenges

  • Integration of 7 magazine portals in one.
  • Extended user and permissions module.
  • Dynamic Content workflow.
  • Selected framework (Joomla) structurally not supporting intended workflow and selected functionalities.

Business Impacts

  • Scalable and extensible portal
  • Ease of user access to the admin section of individual magazines
  • Regulated content delivery
  • Robust inter-related system of publishing.