Design: Die Welt Debatte
Die Welt Debatte is Axel Springer’s most recent project focusing on user generated content in terms of comments, debates, votings and caricatures around recent news and topics.
Welt.de has 6.477.327 visits and 41.830.036 page impressions per month (May 2007) making it the biggest (in terms of users) project I have worked on so far.
The top priority was to build an easy-to-use website that holds masses of information provided by the publisher and its users. In a very short period of time I worked closely with the product manager of Axel springer to churn out over 40 different screens showcasing the various site layouts, navigations paths and AJAX features.
In terms of technology, the open source CMS Drupal was selected and customized by Berlin-based agency Maguro, as it fit the site’s concept perfectly.
A couple of layouts and Drupal’s features are showcased after the click, the complete website can be seen online at http://debatte.welt.de
Drupal’s out-of-the-box and customized features:
- Flexible user registration + privileges system
- Core: used for authors, bloggers, subscribers, commenters
- Articles
- Articles module: used for Kommentare, Leserbriefe
- Possibility to invite external authors to run a blog
- Blog module: used for selected popular bloggers
- Forum, Comments, Voting-API
- Customized Forum Module
- Comment module enhanced with voteAPI
- Poll module
- Various OS and customized modules increasing the speed of development
- Used for authors, bloggers, subscribers, commenters
- Trackback module enables receiving and sending trackbacks
- Quote module enabling users to quote posts (comments, forum threads)
- Live Discussion module to display the newest comments, for ex. related to articles
- PrivateMSG module enabling users to send private messages in the system
- Nice/Clean URLs
- Pathauto module
Further reading
Screenshots
Homepage
Debates
Controversy
Caricatures
Author Profile