Exclusive service platform for professionals in the publishing industry

With the press portal as a lighthouse project, SIRUP is creating a new B2B service world for the Penguin Random House Publishing Group (PRHVG). SIRUP took over the strategic planning, the creative and web conception, the development of the application design as well as the complete technical implementation for the project. Since going live, SIRUP has been supervising the further development of the portal, working closely with the publishing group.

With this web offer, the B2B brand of the renowned publishing house was repositioned for the digital space and at the same time the foundation stone was laid for a portal landscape for further services. The digital branding, which SIRUP created based on the corporate design, supports the orientation as a house of diversity and offers the publishing titles space to develop.

The service for media professionals and journalists is in the foreground: comprehensive information, personal contact, the right contact persons and a convenient option to order review copies. The press portal offers detailed pages for all products and authors as well as events and news from the publishing house. In addition, the main focus was placed on the digitisation of the previews:

The portal contains all the current previews of the various publishers as separate pages - with a table of contents and quick links to the products they contain. In addition to this digital and dynamic view, it is also possible to download previews as PDFs. For the automated PDF creation of previews and of individual titles, we developed a generator that can display one or more products in one of the various high-quality layout templates (matching the output format).

Behind a login barrier, press representatives will find many additional functions. After authorisation by the press team, those who register will be given access to this exclusive area. As soon as users have access, they can easily order review copies. The user profile includes an overview with information on the current status of the order. As a further added value, accredited persons receive access to additional images for download and personalised content. In a dashboard on the homepage, titles, events and news are displayed in a personalised way based on the interests stored and the publishers, products and authors followed.

The press portal was developed on a performant and future-proof system architecture: the basis is the open source content management system Drupal for the creation and maintenance of all editorial content such as article and topic pages. The CMS is connected to the IT infrastructure of PRHVG so that further content (for entities such as titles, authors, etc.) is imported and sent from various sources. Data synchronisation between the CMS, Arvato's publishing systems and other third-party systems uses our message broker (RabbitMQ), which was specially developed for publishing houses and very efficiently - only! - It distributes the required content very efficiently - only! - and transports the information stored in a queue in a binding manner even if interfaces are not available.

We implemented the CMS Drupal in this architecture as a "headless" system, whereby all content is provided via interfaces (REST API). The frontend of the portal is thus decoupled from the CMS and runs as an independent WebApp, which was implemented with the JavaScript framework React. In order to guarantee a high-performance delivery of pages and content, the server-side JavaScript framework Next.js takes care of pre-rendering and caching of the respective pages and creates a pleasant user experience through short loading times and smooth page loading.

This complete separation of WebApp and CMS reduces the complexity in (front-end) development and thus the development and maintenance effort - it accelerates the entire process of realising a web project. With regard to the operation of several clients with different services, the advantages of this system architecture are particularly effective:

Shortly afterwards, we were able to realise PRHVG's Foreign Rights Portal as the first client of this multi-site concept. In order to use synergies, we access one and the same code basis and use the layout and frontend across the board. The content, on the other hand, is individual for each portal: for an international target group, the Foreign Rights Portal is completely in English and, by tailoring, obtains different or adapted data from the publishing systems. This target group-specific targeting could be easily adapted through handling with the Message Broker.