Frieze is both the publisher of the long-running magazine on contemporary arts and culture, and the organiser of the world’s leading annual contemporary arts fairs Frieze New York, Frieze London and Frieze Masters. The Frieze web presence had grown organically with the organisation and was spread over multiple domains - one for each of the publications, fairs and projects. Frieze wanted to consolidate all their content in a single site, under a single brand identity.

Following a phased launch, the new frieze.com website - built by London digital agency Manifesto using Drupal 7 - made its successful debut in March 2016. Viewing the new site as phase 0.1 of a longer term project, a solid base from which they can deliver their digital strategies, Frieze plan to continue augmenting it with additional functionality.

Frieze website
Why Drupal was chosen: 

The key requirements for the platform were: a flexible and extendable CMS/framework; widely used, with long term support; multi-language support; multi-role support; the capability to share content, templates or extensions across multi-instances or multi-sites. The fact that Drupal shipped with all of the key requirements made the decision a lot easier. Together with Migration and Media management modules, and the scalability and stability offered by the Acquia platform, we felt we didn't need to look anywhere else to migrate all the dozens of Frieze websites into one single powerful Drupal installation.

Committed to working in an Agile way, we took advantage of the Acquia Cloud’s exceptional infrastructure to keep our workflow simple and straightforward so we could concentrate on developing the features that were most valuable to Frieze.

Beyond operational requirements, creating a visually compelling showcase of the best in contemporary art meant creating a clean, minimalist visual framework which would push this content to the forefront. Drupal’s huge range of community-contributed modules provided a wealth of options for displaying and managing media and we made extensive use of Views, Attachments, Migration and Entity Translation in particular, for delivering media-rich content to an international audience.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The Problem

The Frieze web presence had grown organically with the organisation and was spread over multiple domains - one for each of the publications, fairs and projects. Frieze wanted to consolidate all their content in a single site, under a single brand identity, to create a unified and seamless digital experience for the customer as they moved between the best new coverage of contemporary art, events, exhibitions and fairs, and across devices.

The Solution

Joining the project after an initial UX and wireframing phase, delivered by nice agency, and using Agile project management methods (a customised version of Scrum) we collaborated closely with product owners at Frieze to define detailed requirements, prioritise features, develop the site and provide user experience support.

We built the new site using Drupal 7. The collaborative approach helped us ensure that the experience for content managers, including managing ad campaigns, events and a VIP area was as convenient as possible. This was essential given the large volume of content posted by editors each month.
We also made a plan for migrating content from the old domains which would preserve search engine visibility.

The Results

A phased launch saw the Frieze Academy section of the site roll out in time to publicise events in Winter 2015. The full frieze.com site launched successfully in March 2016.

By rationalising content spread across 15 websites we were able to reduce 40 different content types down to just 10, dramatically simplifying the process of publishing new events, articles, blog posts and reviews. A bespoke ad delivery system allows site managers to easily set up new campaigns and track impressions/click-through via custom reports.

Viewing the new site as phase 0.1 of a longer term project - a solid base from which they can deliver their digital strategies - Frieze plan to continue augmenting it with additional functionality.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Views, Migration, Entity Translation, Media are the key contributed projects making Frieze.com so great!

Views: Lists, lists everywhere! An online magazine and events listing website can't do without Views.
On the front end, Views were used for Related Content, Latest News, Editor's Picks, Recommended Shows, etc. Every single Frieze.com page has at least 1 view.

Together with the internal filters, contextual arguments and a bit of programmer magic using the different hooks, multiple variants of a single view display are used depending on the context (user role, page position in the menu structure, device).

We also use the 'attachment' display, which a lot of developers don't even know about. We use attachments for the site search and the 'On View' section.

Migration: with content spread over many different websites, we needed more than just a migration script.

Migration is not "just another Drupal module", it's a full migration framework. You can migrate anything from any source type to any Drupal entity/item e.g. you can migrate images from the body markup of the source to media file entity in Drupal and then reference them within the node body like the media WYSIWYG plugin does.

Migration is easy to use (either from the UI or by manually writing the migration tasks), fully extendible and configurable.

Entity Translation doesn't need presentation neither explanation. It's so great that it's now the D8 core way of tranlating content.

The difference between it and normal translating approaches is the fact that it doesn't translate the nodes but the individual fields!

You set which fields need a localised version - you won't translate image fields, or the author of an article, for instance - and you only translate what's needed. You don't duplicate content and pages. The system recognizes the user language and display the field accordingly.

Media: for a website with so many art images to display, a media management interface is fundamental. Media, media browser plus, media oEmbed are the core of the media assets library.

Some other modules frieze couldn't live without: Search API (using Acquia's Solr instance), Display Suite, Context, Features, Dates, and many more.

Community contributions: 

During the course of the project, developers at Manifesto have been active in issues related to many contributed modules.

The two most worthy of note are a patch to the module Media Browser Plus (committed) and another to the Textile project (in review).

The extensive use of Drush on this project also inspired Gabriele Maira's talk on Make for Drush at DrupalCamp London 2016.

Organizations involved: 
Team members: 
On View section of Frieze.com
Frieze.com on mobile
Sectors: 
Arts
Media
Publishing