diy & pet -
The digital publisher in
Open Source!

Modern CMS, publishing suite and store. Open source, of course. everything a digital publisher needs.

Find out in this case study how we supported Dähne Verlag GmbH with its digitalization.

Who is
Dähne Verlag GmbH?

Dähne Verlag was founded in 1970 by Karl-Heinz Dähne. As a family business, the publishing house is divided into two divisions for specialist information:

The publishing house also successfully publishes magazines and an extensive range of books on all aspects of hobby aquaristics.

Dähne Verlag GmbH in figures

Magazines

Online news services

Employees

Weekly newsletter

The challenge

Dähne Verlag came to us with a large ecosystem of different software, some of which was already very old.

As part of this consulting process, a comprehensive digitization concept was developed to prepare Dähne Verlag for the digital age. The concept envisaged the following core elements for the development:

Neos as the new CMS
An open source publishing suite based on the DITA standard
A store based on Sylius

The idea was to create a cross-media publishing platform with a store connection and intuitive content management.

An additional challenge was the migration of the old data into the new solution, which is not easy to automate due to the new information architecture. But we solved this problem too.

A new CMS: Neos!

The basis for the websites of the four trade journals:

diy(diyonline.de),
DIY International(diyinternational.com),
pet(petonline.de)
PET worldwide(petworldwide.net)

should be based on a future-proof and robust CMS that enables the integration of an in-house development such as the Publishing Suite and a store.

At the same time, it should have everything that makes a modern CMS, such as SEO, authorization concepts, workspaces and much more, and also make it easy for editors to work with. The choice fell on Neos as an open source CMS, which we already use in many projects.

Part of the concept was also to design the architecture of the CMS in such a way that assets and certain elements of the four websites can be used together. This reduces the design and development effort. Nevertheless, the pages are separated as "site packages" and can be managed independently of each other.

One example is the newsletter, which was developed in such a way that it is easily adaptable for the editors of the four websites, e.g. article slots can be defined in addition to a chronological listing of the news. The editors can define several articles per slot, which are then output at random. In this way, a new mix of displayed articles is created each time.

The newsletter is created in Neos and Neos is also the leading system for the access data for the paywall, which has already been created in the store, e.g. as part of a subscription. The newsletter is then sent with all the information from Neos to Optimizely (formerly Episerver) and sent in this way. In this way, Neos, as the leading system, links articles, news and subscription/shop data.

This is a good way to reduce and centralize the effort involved in creating newsletters and to be able to maintain customer data in Neos itself.

The automated provision of "flip page PDFs" behind the paywall (e-magazines) and the simple creation of advertising blocks for own products were also implemented in Neos.

An open source publishing suite based on the DITA standard

Publishing is an important topic for many companies today, as it often involves distributing and intelligently managing a wealth of content via various channels.

Thanks to our many years of experience with press and news portals, together with our design partner made in we were also able to coordinate everything perfectly when it came to design.

The system we developed can handle website, social media and newsletter formats as well as print publications. Paywall and marketing functions are also integrated. This requires close integration with Neos and the store in which the subscriptions are managed.

The solution, which we call the "Open Source Publishing Suite", is based on the DITA standard (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). The advantage is that static and dynamic components can be easily merged.

This makes it easier to create content across multiple media. (cross media publishing). Information such as author, image elements and specific information can thus be easily assigned to articles or news items and reused; manual maintenance is no longer necessary. The Publishing Suite also makes it possible to plan the export of content to InDesign, for example.

A solution with individual requirements was implemented in close cooperation with Dähne Verlag.

Subscriptions, products, paywall - a store based on Sylius

The last building block missing for a digital publishing house was a store. Sylius, a powerful Symfony-based framework that is much more than just a store, was chosen to implement the store. All open source, of course.

In addition to all the features of a normal online store for the sale and management of subscriptions and products, this framework offers the possibility of making individual adjustments, such as the integration of a paywall that comes into effect after a certain time or can be triggered by events.

Free and paid articles can be managed centrally and seamless integration with Neos as the leading system and the Open Source Publishing Suite (OSP) is easy to implement and improves user-friendliness for editors and also for customers using the store.

Modern software and more structure for the publishing house of the future

The project with Dähne is a good example of our approach to digitizing a company with a long-term concept. We have been working very closely with Dähne Verlag for many years to develop and continuously improve the websites for the four trade magazines diy, DIY International, pet and PET worldwide.

Thanks to the overall solution we developed for Dähne Verlag, comprising CMS, OSP and store, the publishing house is well positioned for the future.

diy & pet - The digital publisher in Open Source!

Who is Dähne Verlag GmbH?