Munich city portal - muenchen.de
muenchen.de is the official city portal of the state capital of Munich and, with more than 3 million visitors per month, is certainly one of the most frequently visited websites in Munich. The city portal offers a wide range of information on all topics that affect Munich residents.
In the course of the relaunch of muenchen.de, both proprietary and open source content management systems were compared and evaluated in a selection process. Drupal and the Thunder distribution were ultimately chosen.
Drupal was particularly convincing with its wide range of existing features and modules. It was also important to have as much flexibility as possible in order to be able to cover individual needs. The highest standards in terms of security, robustness and accessibility and a globally organized and helpful community were also convincing. Conception and design were carried out using an atomic design approach, in which all functionalities were broken down into individual components, elements and atoms and built up modularly as components of a design system.
As the front-end components are used in the public sector, the focus was already placed on the highest possible degree of accessibility in accordance with WCAG 2.1 and EN 301 549 during the design process and throughout the entire development process.
As both the city portal muenchen.de and the website of the City of Munich (domain:stadt.muenchen.de) share the design and front-end - but not the back-end system - the development team of Portal München Betriebs GmbH & Co. KG also manages the design system and the frontend library. This is documented in a PatternLab and made available to the relevant departments for further use.
The aim is to provide site visitors with a continuous user experience and stringent navigation between all pages. A large number of content elements with paragraphs were created for editorial content. For example, image galleries, social media embeds, info boxes or thematic cross-references can be maintained alongside various text content. Image formats are always fixed and are optimized by the system.
The editorial team and authorized persons can also create overview pages or topic pages using a modular system based on paragraphs.
Dynamic content, such as event dates, is synchronized several times a day via interfaces and output via various filterable views.
In addition, a DXP system is currently being developed based on the existing Drupal instance for muenchen.de, which has already enabled the launch of other websites (e.g. Dulten, Christkindlmärkte).
* A system-independent design system and front-end library
* Consistent brand and user experience across different systems
* A modular, scalable and expandable content management system
* Multilingualism, partly with asynchronous, multilingual content, e.g. only in one specific language
* As good as possible coverage of accessibility according to WCAG 2.1 and EN 301 549
* Multi-stage workflow for editorial content
* Granular authorization system for various roles
* Future use and expansion as a DXP system for other websites (e.g. Dulten, Christmas markets)
* Migration of the DAM (Digital Asset Management) and replacement of the existing, proprietary system with approx. 15,000 data records (cost-effectiveness)
Despite little Drupal experience, we were able to launch the project internally and hand it over to the editorial team for content migration in just 4 months.
And as if that wasn't enough, the site went live just 6.5 months after the start of development! This success story is an exciting case study for all major cities and their city portals. It shows that open source, especially Drupal, can easily cover specific requirements.
