SPIEGEL Publishing House
Multi-website relaunch for 10 websites
The majority of websites within the Spiegel Group were converted to TYPO3. Some of the various websites were created entirely by sitegeist. Further projects were then created in pair programming together with the TYPO3 department of SPIEGEL Verlag. For many years, we have been providing regular pair programming and TYPO3 coaching for the SPIEGEL TYPO3 department.
The SPIEGEL Group
The SPIEGEL Group is one of the most respected media companies in Europe. In addition to SPIEGEL ONLINE and the news magazine DER SPIEGEL, the publishing group includes a large number of other journalistic print and digital products.
Based on the associated design system, sitegeist has been supporting SPIEGEL-Verlag in the design and realisation of all corporate websites since 2018. The main websites spiegel.de and Manager Magazin are created and maintained using their own proprietary system.
The publisher's strategic goal was to be able to develop all of its other websites using a standardised platform. In the long term, all these activities are to be taken over in-house.
sitegeist however, SPIEGEL has been available for many years as a coaching partner for the SPIEGEL internal TYPO3 department, as a service provider and partner for qualitative or quantitative bottlenecks, as well as for complex projects.
Our projects for SPIEGEL
Below you will find an excerpt of the projects we have realised for SPIEGEL to date.
TYPO3-Coaching
The first step was to get to know the SPIEGEL IT employees responsible for TYPO3 and to develop a coaching roadmap:
- Overview of the TYPO3 universe
- Joint discussion and creation of a unified but flexibly expandable TYPO3-based platform
- Conveying the concepts behind TYPO3 through specific use cases
- Concept development, requirements analysis, and timeline planning for the first joint project
- Iterative development from one coaching session to the next
Here, SPIEGEL benefited from sitegeist’s extensive project experience. We didn’t teach theoretical knowledge, but instead developed pragmatic solutions for real-world applications. Our approach was heavily based on TYPO3 community best practices and our own project experience. We evaluated risks together and developed viable solutions with SPIEGEL’s team.
Various collaboration methods were used depending on the task:
- Live coding by the coach
- Live coding by a SPIEGEL employee
- Pair programming
- Code reviews via merge requests
- Coworking
Depending on the subject area, different experts from sitegeist were brought into the coaching sessions. As a result, SPIEGEL’s team gained insights not only into TYPO3 but also into frontend workflows and server administration.
A key component of the coaching was working with isolated frontend components and the living style guide. In close collaboration with SPIEGEL employees, we refined workflows and solutions already used at sitegeist and created a new TYPO3 tool for building living style guides. Significant parts of the development were sponsored by SPIEGEL. The resulting Fluid Styleguide has since been released by sitegeist as an open-source extension and is now available for the broader TYPO3 community:
