LIV partners with F7 for a modern TYPO3 communications platform
Efficient data management meets scalability and accessible design.
A Leading Medical Research Institute
Since 1995, the Leibniz Institute of Virology (LIV) has been one of Germany’s leading centers of virological research. As part of the renowned Leibniz Association, LIV develops innovative approaches to advance scientific research related to the biology of human virus species. The institution actively promotes collaboration between leading experts in virology through its comprehensive database of over 5,000 publications.
In 2023, LIV sought to overhaul its website, transforming it into a modern, high-performance platform that would enable efficient administration and simplified search capabilities through a centralized knowledge pool.
After a public tender process, it selected F7 Media GmbH to lead the relaunch. F7 distinguished itself based on the clarity and accuracy of its proposal, displaying a deep understanding of the project and a clearly communicated concept, including an ability to translate complex themes into engaging visual language.
Flexible Content Management with TYPO3
TYPO3 was chosen as the ideal content management system (CMS) for the project due to two main factors. First, LIV’s editors were already familiar with the platform, which made for a smoother onboarding process and shorter training periods. Additionally, the LIV team was aware of TYPO3’s renowned scalability, robust security features, and ability to continuously add new features to its backend, constantly evolving the TYPO3 instance to meet changing needs.
Likewise, TYPO3’s status as a leading open source content management system meant increased transparency and cost efficiency, both of which played an important role in LIV’s ultimate decision
Building a Flexible and Accessible Communication Platform
The primary objective of the project was the delivery of an intuitive, flexible, and accessible central communication platform that offers seamless interface integration, simple maintenance for LIV’s publications, including contact data records.
The platform would have to be both flexible, capable of robust data management, and remain accessible both to editors and to end users.
Efficient Data Management and Intuitive Content Design
Creating efficient data management was a key focus for the F7 team and their partners at LIV. The institute’s large data records and extensive portfolio of publications would need to be easy to search through, edit, and maintain. Additionally, fast and intuitive access to content, along with an accessible frontend experience were key objectives and benchmarks of assessing the project’s success.
To achieve these goals, F7’s work centered around the following four key areas of operations:
Database Automation: Designed the publication database in such a way that published content by LIV employees and associates are automatically synchronized from the connected PubMed database. Through this synchronization, automated mapping can link publications directly to the corresponding contact data records, and include them in the Solr search index.
High-Powered Search: The F7 team deployed the powerful Apache Solr search tool. Its powerful search capability enables searches with lightning speed and precision, ideal for large-scale databases with thousands of records that need to be quickly identified.
Intuitive Content Management: A user-friendly backend was created for the maintenance of contact data records, simplifying the process of assigning existing publication data with automated mapping. The frontend features a list function with alphabetical jump labels as well as personalized pages, giving users the ability to quickly access comprehensive profile information.
Accessibility: As an important aspect of this project, steps were taken to ensure that the website met WCAG standards and enabled long-term barrier-free access. This includes performing regular internal audits.
A Modern TYPO3 Content Platform
The new website was launched in February 2024, and the close collaboration between F7 and LIV resulted in a modern, barrier-free platform that enabled efficient backend data management, along with providing end users easy access to important virological information.
Workflows were markedly improved through the implementation of the Solr search function, and automated publication and contact management capabilities enabled increased efficiency and delivered real impact in the form of improved workflows.
Members of various research departments were able to be onboarded and learned to effectively use the new platform, maintaining content autonomously, while the automated publication handling increased efficiency in day-to-day operations.
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