Rights and Liberty on Your Screen: New Website of Al Jazeera Media Network

The Public Liberties and Human Rights Center was founded in 2008 as a "desk" within Al Jazeera. Today it is staffed by a diverse team which works across different areas of the network. The editorial team operates on all of Al Jazeera's platforms and in all of the network's languages. The journalists produce original stories and content examining human rights issues around the world, complementing the network's hard-hitting news. Their website contains information about initiatives and events organized by the Center as well as many images and videos related to their projects. In 2015, Vardot developed a new website to bring together all the work Al Jazeera does regarding human right through all its platforms to one hub.   

Goal of the project

The goal of Vardot was to build an editor-friendly distribution that will also bring visitors a seamless user experience. The mission was to launch a modern multilingual SEO-optimized website that will be integrated with social networks and have the ability to handle a high traffic.

The right CMS for media networks

Vardot already partnered with Al Jazeera to develop other AJ websites such as  Sharek, Forum, Stream and Cafe. All these sites were built on Drupal because the client was looking for a CMS that will be able to handle high traffic, different permission levels, a large number of subpages and at the same time be secure and flexible for users. For the AJ Public Liberties project, we used our very own Drupal 7 distribution, Uber Publisher, that in our opinion ideally meets the needs of the Media producers and Online News Publishers.

The idea of this distribution is easy: most of news websites require the same package of features such as the ability to upload and edit text quickly, create roles and permissions for a better security, add taxonomy terms to organize the content in the convenient way, handle  high traffic and more. Uber Publisher does just that. It is a combination of  modules, configurations, settings and custom development for online publishers.

Why our customers always choose Drupal

Uber Publisher as a competitive advantage

Having the “foundation” of the website ready, our team was able to  concentrate on the  uniqueness of the Liberties website without wasting time for a basic coding.  As a result, the work on the new website of Al Jazeera Public Liberties & Human Rights Centre took less than one month.

Furthermore,  we were able to to provide Al Jazeera  with many different ways to change the display of content listings to meet their needs at any time. Depending on what Al Jazeera content managers wanted to showcase, the site allows them to feature one main article or multiple articles to tell a story and promote the most important news first.

Building a good website in just one month is very impressive, but we are looking forward to be able to work even faster. After updating Uber Publisher and making it more universal for any kind of online publishing company we expect to decrease not only the time of the development, but also the average total cost of ownership of news websites.

Bottom line

Building sites for enterprise companies always means accepting a big challenge, but our team likes to exceed expectations. Working with Al Jazeera before we’ve learned a lot about our client’s assumptions and ways of working, and this time we’ve just used the experience collected before and made a high-quality website in less than one month. Like Al Jazeera Public Liberties & Human Rights Centre contributes a lot to the awareness of humanitarian organizations, Vardot is happy to add some improvements to Drupal and share our experience with you.