Thunder Partner Day in Munich

New features for Thunder

36 participants from 15 companies joined us for the Thunder Partner Day. Both partners and Certified Thunder Integrators (CTIs) used the first session to show which modules they would like to use to improve Thunder. Users of Thunder and Drupal can look forward to a lot of new functionalities:

Timo Welde from galaniprojects and Wolfgang Ziegler from Drunomics discussed the liveblogging module for Drupal which they have developed in cooperation with kurier.at. It comes with new posts in realtime and lazy-loading. Learn more about this module at https://www.drupal.org/project/liveblog.

Pascal Reutener from the Swiss company A&F introduced their ideas for connecting Thunder and print systems. Thus, Thunder could be used as one tool to publish in all channels. With a lot of expertise in traditional publishing, they are now looking for competence in the field of digital publishing.

Simone Reitze and Dennis Beste from nexx.tv presented their video solutions and freemium model for Thunder users. They pointed out some of the online video trends and challenges of the next years: live streaming, 360 degree videos, and video storytelling.

Andreas Sahle from Wunder Group and Andreas Krautzberger from galaniprojects talked about their ideas for a user-friendly back-end and presented wireframes as well as a sneak preview of the future screen design. Read about the roadmap for a better authoring UX at the project page and have a look at some wireframes here.

Miro Dietiker from MD Systems stated that content was more than a simple article but consisted of media, interactive elements, embeds, widgets, and lots more. He presented his vision of using paragraphs as building blocks for site building to gain maximum flexibility while keeping the process simple at the same time.

Mike Hawkins from Riddle pointed out that online advertising might soon be dead. That’s why publishers needed tools like quizzes or polls to keep users engaged – and to collect their data for further business models.

In the second session, Daniel Bosen presented the Thunder Core Team’s ideas for a roadmap. Topics we would like to tackle include a demo version of Thunder, better social media integration, improved documentation, and lots more. We will keep you updated on this.

Joint marketing activities

The third session of the Thunder Partner Day focused on joint marketing activities to draw attention to Thunder. The participants presented their ideas and options for gaining more Thunder users and growing the community of contributors of new functionality.

Michel van Velde from One Shoe pointed out why Drupal and Thunder especially need more marketing: He cited an unnamed CEO: “Drupal will only compete successfully if there is a stronger focus on what the chief marketing officer wants from a CMS.”

Ulrich Heckenberger from Valiton and his colleague Caroliene Götz gave a short introduction of their solutions for Thunder and explained some ideas for future cooperation, such as jointly visiting fairs like dmexco.

Tamara Altendorf and Sabrina Norman from Acquia talked about personalization with Acquia Lift and their marketing activities. They proposed to work together in the next year in the fields of webinars, events like “Lunch and Learn”, and joint success stories.

Martin Normann Lund from the Norwegian company Ramsalt emphasized the importance of getting “professional” and making a marketing plan. This should include, for example, trainings, videos, courses, and documentation as well as common press releases and news stories.

Together the partners and CTIs will now develop concepts for workshops, road shows, and joint PR measures in small mixed groups. So, the Thunder Partner Day was a huge success. “We started nine months ago, and I am pleased to see what a great community has emerged”, said Ingo Rübe. “All of you have done a great deal for Thunder and Drupal by working on it incessantly developing new functions. I have not experienced anything like this in my entire career”, he said, thanking all participants. 

Current state of Thunder

Thunder started nine months ago. This week, the sixth release candidate was published. It improves the updater service and updates some contrib modules to the newest versions. You can download the version here.

Today, eight Burda brands are using Burda’s content management system, with 65 million visits per month in total. Some other publishers are in the middle of relaunching their websites, such as kurier.at. We have been talking to about 400 people from more than 200 companies in various countries since March of last year, adding up to around 200 potential clients, integrators and industrial partners. The positive response shows: Thunder is in demand.

“Let us use the momentum to share our knowledge and join forces to make Thunder great”, Ingo Rübe appealed to his audience at the Thunder Partner Day. And the participants showed great motivation to do so, following the day’s motto: „Let’s go out und spread the word!“