Frequently Asked Questions

Industry partners, publishers, individuals, implementation partners and the core team form the Thunder Coalition. The goals of the coalition are

• to enable publishers to deploy rich functionality for their products very quickly and at reasonable cost,
• to share functionality among publishers, driving the industry and providing excellent user experience with the individual content,
• to enable industry partners to spread their outstanding services amongst publishers and to charge for premium services as the publishers grow,
• to enable implementation partners to gain knowledge about Thunder programming and implementation in order to provide services to publishers and industry partners.

The Coalition discusses feature requests and offers, celebrates new launches, and is a platform for programmers and executives in the publishing industry. There is mailing list, a Slack team, and we’re planning to have regular Coalition meetings in the future.

Industry partners may add functionality to Thunder, provided that this functionality is useful for publishers, free of charge for unlimited time and that the industry partner is invited and/or accepted by the Core Team.

No. If a publisher wants to procure premium functionality from any industry partner, the Thunder Coalition is not involved. Any contract is established directly between the respective industry partner and the publisher.

The Thunder Coalition offers industry partners to have their software or services used by many publishers. The industry partners may also offer additional premium functionality, which publishers might want to use and also pay for.

thunderdemo.com provides a free, simple and cloud-based trial of Thunder, developed by our partners MD Systems, Platform-as-a-Service provider Platform.sh and Microsoft Cloud Germany. This Thunder instance is made to stay: The demo instance starts with a free 30 days trial on the inexpensive development plan that can be scaled up in various levels for production use, including high availability. It is operated on Microsoft Azure and located in Germany.

Quick install on your desktop (Video tutorial)

1. Download and install the Acquia Dev Desktop: https://dev.acquia.com/downloads
2. Open the Acquia Dev Desktop. Click on “+“ and then on “New Drupal Site“.
3. Find Thunder in the list and click on “Install“. You’ll be asked to fill a form with some data, but for testing Thunder just leave it as it is. Click “Finish” and Thunder will be downloaded to your system.
4. After this process is finished, click on the link to the „Local site” and Thunder will open in your browser.
5. The menu will navigate you through the installation process. Choose your language and click on “Save and continue”.
6. In the next step, you can configure your installation: add a site name, your e-mail-address, a user name and a password. Click on “Save and continue”.
7. Now you could choose additional modules, but for an easy start, we recommend using the default selection. Click on “Save and Continue” for the last time.
8. You’re done! Your Thunder site opens and you can start the tour to show you around.

Download from Drupal.org

The time of use for all Thunder modules is unlimited. No business model. No need to pay.

There is absolutely no business model. And there are no logos or ads popping up.

No. Just download and go ahead. If you would like to receive news about thunder, sign up to our newsletter by sending ‚Subscribe‘ to [email protected]. If you want to contribute or collaborate or influence the development, just contribute your code and inform the Thunder Core Team of your work at [email protected].

In general, neither Hubert Burda Media, nor the Thunder Core Team, nor any other individual or organisation who contributes to the functionality included in the Thunder distribution under the GNU General Public License (i.e. for free) can be held liable for any bugs, crashes or any other actual or perceived misperformance of the software or the system. However, individual service level agreements may be negotiated for premium services provided on top of the Thunder functionality by industry partners to specific clients.

Thunder offers small companies and individuals to become Certified Thunder Integrators.

Publishers using Thunder are encouraged (but not obliged) to join the Thunder Coalition and add new functionality to the distribution. But this is completely up to you or your company’s regulations.

Please report to [email protected] describing the module and the effect. If you can fix the bug yourself, please go ahead and either inform [email protected] or use the mechanisms on drupal.org.

Speak about Thunder. Write about Thunder. Contribute new modules, encourage people to use Thunder.

Thunder is a Drupal distribution for professional publishers. It consists of the current Drupal functionality, lots of useful modules from publishers and industry partners, and an environment which makes it easy to install, deploy and add new functionality.

The distribution is maintained by the Thunder Core Team ([email protected]). The Core Team decides which modules are added to or removed from the distribution. The Core Team also ensures that all basic functionality is available free of charge.

Thunder is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is free of any licence or maintenance fee.

Forever? Probably not alone. However, Hubert Burda Media will fund the initiative for a significant period that is long enough to establish Thunder in the market. If Thunder is successful, we might change the funding to a foundation model like Apache.org in a couple of years.

The Core Team’s expenses are paid by Hubert Burda Media. There is no plan to earn money. Hubert Burda Media believes that the Thunder Coalition will speed up their own development so much, that the investment in the core team will pay back easily in the form of improved functionality and the sharing of knowledge and ideas.

The Thunder Core Team are a small number of publishing experts and computer scientists. They maintain the distribution, handle industry relations, publishers’ requests and offers as well as specialists training. They also run the Coalition’s infrastructure (like thunder.org) and organise events like the annual meeting.

Certified Thunder Integrators (CTI) are IT consultancies, developers, agencies, and similar IT professionals with a proven knowledge and practical experience in managing and implementing successful Thunder projects. CTIs need to be certified by the Thunder Core Team in order to be allowed to use the label ‘Certified Thunder Integrator’ and the associated badge to promote their services.

The CTI Badge is a seal of quality for excellent Thunder services. Certified Thunder Integrators may use the Badge for marketing their services.

When CTIs use the CTI-Badge in their online communication activities, the Badge should be set-up as a hyperlink to thunder.org. In an offline context (e.g. print publications, business cards, etc.) "www.thunder.org" must be mentioned, too.
If you need the CTI Badge in print quality resolution, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

No. Everyone and every company is allowed to implement Thunder and to run Thunder projects. But Certified Thunder Integrators (CTI) have a certified knowledge and a proven track record in doing so successfully. And only CTIs are allowed to use the label ‘Certified Thunder Integrator’ and the associated badge to promote their services.

In order to become a CTI, please apply for certification by sending an e-mail to the Thunder Core Team ([email protected]). The Core Team will then guide you through the certification process.

In order to be certified by the Thunder Core Team, a company or developer has to demonstrate that they/he/she have/has conducted at least one successful significant project that implements Thunder in a professional environment.

The Thunder Core Team will conduct a short interview via phone, mail, chat, or similar means with the respective project owner/sponsor. Furthermore, the Core Team will review at least parts of the software code. The project and the implementation have to respect the following guidelines:

• The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practices (http://www.acm.org/about/se-code), as well as
• The Drupal standards, security and best practices recommendations (https://www.drupal.org/developing/best-practices).

When reviewing the code, the Core Team will keep any non-public parts of the code strictly confidential. Further, it will not use any knowledge of the code for Thunder or any other projects.