Render Media, RNDR, is a news agency based in California, comprised of multiple brands that use socially engaging content to inform, empower, and entertain a large audience. RNDR has ownership of the Opposing Views, America News, Food Please, and Watch This! brands. The company strives to provide an unfiltered view into culture, society, and politics around the world. DPCI partnered with RNDR to help enhance its media management strategies and provide the agency with a superior image management and delivery platform for its news websites.
RNDR was looking for a better way to manage, track, share, and distribute image assets for all four branded Drupal CMS platforms. The agency hoped to provide staff with an easier process for image upload and search within Drupal that would reduce asset duplication, facilitate asset reusability within brands, and ultimately increase editor's efficiency. To meet these goals, RNDR retained DPCI to implement EnterMedia, an open-source digital asset management system, integrated with Drupal via the EMBridge module to provide enhanced digital asset upload, search, and retrieval functionality for each of the brands.
To get started, DPCI met with RNDR staff to help define the agency's exact requirements. In this stage, DPCI collaborated with RNDR to gather functional requirements, business requirements, and define the metadata model which is essential for a successful DAM implementation. After the necessary requirements were gathered and documented, DPCI installed, configured, and themed EnterMedia on a RNDR server in the cloud. Simultaneously, DPCI developers were busy at work completing the EMBridge enhancements that were required by the Render Media business side.
EMBridge, a contrib Drupal module maintained by DPCI, is used to connect EnterMedia with Drupal to serve images, or other assets, to Drupal for any entities. For this project, DPCI added tracking functionality to the module. This allowed RNDR to see which of the four sites had used an asset and on which node, when it was last used, and the title of the article in which it was used. In addition to this useful tracking information, this enhanced image search by extending the amount of metadata included with each image.
DPCI also partnered with RNDR’s internal team and Crifkin Amalgamated LLC, an LA-based consultancy, to adapt some of the existing website customizations to work with EnterMedia. The team from Crifkin updated the Redis-backed multivariate title and feature image optimization engine to use EnterMedia as a back-end, adapted the theme and API endpoints to handle legacy and EnterMedia-provided assets, and provided ongoing strategic consulting for RNDR’s internal team’s efforts.
Render Media successfully launched the EnterMedia and EMBridge implementation with Drupal in early 2016 on the Opposing Views website. RNDR plans to continue to push this feature to the other three brands within the agency to truly take advantage of the power provided by the integration.
