Ah! those days, when copies of movies were sold in the form of DVDs, fast forwarding and rewinding through the scenes made us feel that the power is all in our hands. 

But with the evolution in technology and internet presence  (in terms of marketing a film), the need for a movie website has come a long way after witnessing a growth in streaming services.  

Setting up a movie website means understanding the goals of building it in the very first place. Be it a teaser website, production blog, or a distribution site - depending on the demand of the audience, web development is brought into action.

And nothing does a better task than Drupal. Often preferred by brands that deal with a high volume of traffic, this  CMS platform would offer you effective features and functionalities for your website.

What Does Drupal Offer Your Website With?

Choosing a Content Management System for your website is like choosing the cast for your movie. And Drupal proves to be the CMS which give the best of “all worlds”. It would provide you with an ample number of functionalities and fulfill all your customer's needs. 

Starting from:

Content Authoring 

While you are creating your movie website, there might be instances that would lead you to a situation in which you wish to edit your content or any particular page. It may be a change in the movie title or modification in the synopsis.

Drupal 8 features bring about an unusual power into the hands of content authors. With modules like WYSIWYG CKEditor, drafting and editing content have become a piece of cake.

The use of client-side editors to edit content, installing and integrating choice editor has been made even more simple. It includes HTML editors (i.e WYSIWYG), pseudo-editor (to insert markup into text area) and  flash based applications (for production of animation)

The WYSIWYG module also presents you with an abstraction layer for other Drupal modules to integrate with the editor which implies that Drupal modules can expose content editing functionality, indifferent of what editor has installed.

New Theme Engine

Just like resolutions are important for deciding the quality of a movie, a theme also plays a vital role in your website. When an individual visits your movie website, the very first thing which would attract them would be its theme. An interesting and impressive theme would never backfire when it comes to user experience.

Theme engine combines data with templates from themes and shows the final HTML result to the user 

Drupal 8 includes a brand new theming engine called Twig, which is PHP-based, flexible, fast, and secure. It helps in creating a beautiful and functional website that has a much simpler syntax. Offering features like template inheritance, automatic escaping, variable filters, and macros to improve the development workflow. 

Responsive Designs  

According to Statista,  52.4 percent of the global web traffic is originated from mobile devices (making it half of the population) which clearly implies the importance of responsive designs. 

Responsive Designs would improve user experience which would in return portray a positive impression for your movie website. If your fans are able to easily access your website, it would more likely to increase the numbers in terms of traffic and bring out a good number of conversion rates even in the future.

Drupal 8 is mobile first in its approach. All the built-in themes that come with Drupal 8 are responsive, along with an admin theme that adapts to different screen sizes. This would allow different users to access your website at different places on various devices. A module like Breakpoint, which comes with Drupal core, resizes the website and images according to the device.

Nordisk Film Cinema is a great example of this. They wanted a responsive and a visually engaging website with cutting-edge functionalities. This was demanded so that the current and future website users have the power to easily navigate the site regardless of the device they were using. The requirement of the responsive site was also because many visitors use their smartphones to buy tickets on the go. Thus Drupal was the best choice for them. 

Security 

While you are funding for the construction of your movie website, you expect it to be secure and safe from hackers and potential viruses. Drupal has a very good track record when it comes to security, and has recognized process for investigation, verifying and publishing security problems. When it comes to security, Drupal vulnerability statistics clearly depicts security attacks that have considerably reduced over the years.

You can easily enhance the security of your website with help of Drupal security modules like captcha (response test to determine whether a user is a human or not), password policy (enforces restrictions in users passwords), security kit (protects the website from cross-scripting, cross-site requesting, click jagging etc), two-factor authentication (provides extra security with code authentication on mobile) 

Not only this but Drupal design meets all the security standard of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Hence, Drupal core, being highly secure, builds sites that can be patched within minutes. This lowers the risk of broken features or any error to a minimum.

Migration 

Entertainment Weekly was one of the sites that were stuck managing content across ten different WordPress VIP blogs and a large legacy Vignette site. They needed to incorporate their digital content and implement a rapid publishing solution to lower the time between publishing and going live.

An agency was approached to help migrate content and integrate editorial workflow onto a single Drupal-based solution. Migration of more than 20 years of content was all needed to be considered for the creation of the platform. Drupal was chosen because of the fact that its core consisted of the migrate module that provides API and base implementation for importing up of data. 

Similarly, at any instance of time, you might feel a need to migrate from one site to another, and that is the reason why Drupal is the hero for you. The core migrate module in Drupal 8 provides APIs and base implementation for importing data into Drupal.  

Web Hosting 

It is important to buy a web space to build your movie website in order to get it live and active on the internet. 

This is only possible with the help of web hosting. Drupal 8 provides you with many web hosting options. Which are safe to use and efficiently handles your site traffic.

So, if you want to make a better choice when it comes to web hosting companies, you can choose:

• Pantheon
• Liquid Web
• InMotion
• Bluehost
• Site5
• Pair
• Omega8.CC
• Drupion
• Green Geeks
• Black Mesh  

Manages Configuration

Configuration Management is an important factor of any CMS platform. In Drupal 8 configuration data is stored in files, separated from the site database, and has configuration management built into it at the file system level. Carrying configuration elements from local development to the server has been made really easy with Drupal 8.

The contributed module in Drupal 8, i.e Config Filter helps in built-in configuration management capabilities by providing an API to support different workflow which filters out or modifies configuration changes as being pushed to the configuration. 
Config Split is an another contributed module in Drupal 8 that builds on top of Config Filter that allows a difference in configuration between various environment.  

Managing configuration would allow you to establish a consistency in terms of performance and also eliminate the time to build out additional resources without worrying about the user prone errors. 

Configuration Management System in Drupal can manage things like:

• Modules setting and states 
• Content Types
• Block Types
• Permissions
• Views
• Theme Settings

Content Architecture 

We have reached a point where the old drupal hymn “create content first and see it later” is not enough to succeed with the content editors. Hence, Drupal is competing and replacing other CMS when it comes to content architecture. Content Editors expect full flexibility on how to create, display, approve and publish content. Modules like panels and panelizer, a distribution like panopoly and demo framework have helped in the modification of panorama in Drupal.  

One of the most important steps of building your movie website is deciding how to structure your content architecture. There are ample numbers of ways in which you can build out complex content type in Drupal 8. Here, every piece of content is an entity that stores different types of content.

Your movie website would have entities like the cast, edition, categories, review, collection and so on.

Drupal modules like views contribute largely to the whole structure of the content architecture. With this Drupal 8 feature firmly integrated with the core, the creation of pages, blocks, admins have been made easy.

Menu module in Drupal core is the static hierarchy of the content. This module allows the administration to customize the websites navigation menu. You can easily add new menus and edit the existing ones. Apart from these two, Entity reference field or link field explicitly allows the addition of link from one content item to another. 

Accessibility 

In addition to providing subtitles in multiple languages for a worldwide audience, understanding the need of closed captions and audio description have broadened the customer base to include hundreds and millions of people worldwide who have hearing loss and vision impairments. 

Making a movie accessible is not only a choice but a legal requirement as well.

Accessibility for the visually impaired community is a really important factor for creating any website. Drupal 8 has excellent support for industry standards like WAI ARAI, and with the help of screen readers and other assistive technology, Drupal is ensuring accessibility at a much bigger level.

Performance 

We all are aware of the three-second rule implemented on a website. Even the smallest change in a website page results in the modification of the traffic noticeably. Hence, speed immensely contributes to the strength and the performance of the website.

Drupal 8 caches all the entities, and helps in the speed and streaming sector to optimize the performance as it is needed. With modules like varnish and redis this task is easily achievable. These modules allow the developers to optimize the site load performance for the end-user significantly.

Drupal 8 core also consists of a module which is the Big Pipe that loads the dynamic pages quickly by loading various section of the webpage in parallel. It is done so that the end users do not have to wait for the Document Object Model (DOM) to be completely ready to start an interaction with the website. Drupal allows the user to tinker with the core. A programmer can twist out a lot of performance boost from a Drupal website. It primarily caters to the enterprise market, hence the websites are well suited and handled with a large volume of data and thousands of pages. It should be noted that a well managed Drupal website rarely goes down or slows down the procedure. 

Multilingual and Multisite Capabilities 

Drupal’s multisite feature allows the user to share a single Drupal installation site core. This is specifically useful for managing the code since each upgrade only needs to be done once. Every site would have its own database and it would also have its own configurational settings. If you have a complex site or a very different site to manage then Drupal multisite is the best option. 

Drupal is also capable of supporting and managing multiple language out-of-the-box. Which means support for the translation of the content as well as for the translation of the back-end user interface of the CMS itself. Having the support of the multilingual website means more audience. With the addition of only four modules in Drupal 8 for language support, all the monolingual and non-english website are easily translated. 

A great example of this would be Turner Broadcasting General Entertainment multi-site which is built on Drupal platform. The site consists of entertainment brands like Cartoon Network, Boomerang, CNN etc. Drupal was primarily used because of its multilingual and multi-site capabilities. It successfully built enterprise-level CMS websites, and scaled to a high level of traffic and maintained availability and performance.

Getting Noticed 

Once you have a website, you need to get it noticed so that people will start visiting it. In other words, if the website ranks high it would definitely get noticed. Drupal has some set of modules which does the task pretty well. Modules like Pathauto, Meta tag, Site verification, Path Redirect, and Google Analytics help in creating URL paths and optimize search engines. 

• Pathauto

Drupal automatically operates and generate path identity for the content without asking the users to specify the path identity. These identities are based on pattern system that uses token with the administrator.

 

• Path redirect

Drupal allows the user to redirect from one path to another path utilizing HTTP redirect status. This would prevent the user to encounter with error 404 if the path was changed or redirected at some instance. 

 

• Site verification

Drupal is such a user-friendly domain that it allows them to verify the site and domain ownership for a search engine. There are two types of methods which support verification - the addition of meta tags or uploading a particular file. 

• Meta Tags

Drupal automatically grants the users with structured metadata or meta tags. These elements help the website with ranking and displaying of the site in the search engine outcomes. 

 

• Google Analytics

Drupal is one such platform which supports web analysis. It presents the users with class web analytic capability, these capabilities make Google analytics an excellent tool for monitoring SEO results. 

Community 

Drupal community constantly updates and builds modules to expand the platform for compatibility and security reasons. In other words, Drupal is one of those platforms which checks for errors and makes it certain that the site is protected all the time. 

Drupal association has a team that looks after the security of Drupal and its module. Thus, your movie website is surely in good hands as there are people watching it all the time. By providing with several customer support features that are built in the service. Features like:

• Forum

The user can post a question or a query which is answered by the professionals once it is seen by them.

• Slack and online chat

The user can chat with the Drupal community which is maintained by them and handled by them.

• Community documentation

The user can read the online documentation which is written and maintained by the Drupal community. 

• Books

There is an ample number of user guide and manuals which presents the users with remedies and solutions. 

Case Study 

Cambridge film festival is one of the oldest and most prestigious cultural events in the East Anglia region. Drupal was chosen to build the website. It was selected because it maps the content-rich film data into a CMS that gave them an opportunity to build a powerful film search.

As a key part of the festival’s marketing strategy, the new website was used to raise awareness, increase audiences and attract the world's best filmmakers.

Focusing on the user experience (UX), it was built fully to have a responsive website which can be viewed across all devices. It was also essential to make searching, sharing and booking online via the mobiles and tablets easy.

Although Drupal 8 was still in the process of development during the introduction of this project, the breadth of functionality and flexibility in the core was taken into consideration.

While building the theme for the Cambridge Film Festival, the advantage of the new Twig theming system was also taken. Individual pages were built in a more styled and modular way, the Twig debug mode did a great job of guiding them through the process, making file name suggestions that offered a range of options for theming elements either globally or individually.

The film search utilizes the View module as well. Using Views made the complex relationships easy to set up, and the also advanced caching which meant that even though the view was quite complicated, it loaded very quickly under most circumstances.

Wrapping Up 

Just like every movie has a happy ending ( if not then that's not the ending), bringing your site to a position where the world watches it and appreciates it is what you desire for. And attaining this task is the big climax to the entire scene. 

Thus, to grab those standing ovations working smart is the key. At OpenSense Labs, we actually sense the need of you producing a user-friendly site and thus provide services that contribute highly to your journey of constructing the website. Thereby, call us at [email protected] to build the desired movie website.