Press release
Innovative Digital Presence: Agency BRANDCODE wins Splash Award 2023 for FHP Relaunch
The Munich agency BRANDCODE has been honoured with the prestigious Splash Award. The coveted award recognises the best Drupal projects in Germany and Austria and honours outstanding digital projects and innovative solutions. The relaunch of the university website was realised by their own distribution "Brandcoded", based on the Drupal 9 content management system.
The main objective of the relaunch was to modernise the digital presence and merge the website and intranet. The focus was on connecting various tools and systems and implementing review and approval processes for quality assurance. Typo3 as the content management system was successfully replaced by Drupal 9.
Extensive analyses of the content, taking into account existing Typo3 content and user expectations, were carried out in advance. An extensive set of content modules enables flexible content maintenance, filterable according to central taxonomies, and contributes to interdisciplinary links in line with the university's profile lines. Christopher Lewis, CTO at BRANDCODE: "Maximum flexibility with maximum consistency. What sounds like a contradiction is not. A CMS must be robust enough to guarantee quality and user experience despite different requirements and content design. That's the be-all and end-all."
Challenges and solutions
The migration of content from Typo3, the connection of various tools and systems and the implementation of a single sign-on via Shibboleth/SAML were challenges that were successfully overcome. Accessibility was ensured by optimising the front end and a logical, barrier-free structure of the back end. A roles and rights system enables flexibility in content maintenance, while a release workflow and multilingualism ensure controlled publication.
The course catalogue data is imported from a third-party system. A tricky task that was successfully solved in order to enable a simple, loss-free transfer of the data into the CMS.
The new website of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam not only integrates the public presence, but also closed areas that function as an intranet. It also offers numerous interfaces to other systems, including a mobile course catalogue as a web app for students. The digital signage system on campus will also be maintained via the content management system in future.
Status quo
With this project, the BRANDCODE agency has not only succeeded in combining the various platforms and tools on one website, but also in achieving a high level of acceptance among the university's various stakeholders. The project is therefore a good case study for the use of Drupal in a large decentralised organisation with many different requirements and is just one of the references for public institutions.
It also shows that Drupal is the system of choice when it comes to enabling editorial teams to design content flexibly, put it online promptly and present it in a modern and appealing way.
About the Splash Awards
The Splash Awards were presented in Germany for the first time in 2017. The award is based on an idea from the Dutch Drupal community, which has presented the Splash Awards for the best Drupal projects every year since 2014. In Germany, the Splash Awards are organised in a different city every year. In 2023, the Splash Awards were presented in Mannheim at an awards ceremony in November.
www.fh-potsdam.de
https://www.brandcode.de
https://splashawards.de