No, it’s not the first time datenwerk implemented a Sulu CMS for a client. After having implemented a website for Kinderfreunde, datenwerk, an innovative digital agency and a Sulu Gold Partner, used Sulu to build a website for the Austrian government. The Austrian Ministry of Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology, or the BMK (short for Bundesministerium für Klimaschutz), envisioned a central portal for information about energy creation and consumption, available for all citizens as a single point of truth. Due to the highly specialized nature of the website, the ministry needed an experienced partner for planning and implementation and found datenwerk.
Founded in 2000, datenwerk is one of Austria’s longest-running digital agencies. When Web 2.0 began to take shape around 2006, datenwerk radically changed their strategy towards using open source solutions. Soon, they discovered the flexibility of the Symfony framework and of Sulu. Today, datenwerk partners with big agencies such as Team Farner, one of Europe’s largest PR agencies and the main contractor of this project. datenwerk’s primary clients are public or semi-public institutions and state agencies like the BMK, which made datenwerk a natural fit for the BMK’s dashboard project.
Initially, BMK’s project had a much more focused goal: to help Austrian citizens through the gas crisis. Today, it is the government’s information hub for tracking its progress towards renewable energy sources.
The BMK's response to the natural gas crisis
Austria, 2022: The war in Ukraine led to skyrocketing natural gas prices. Citizens were concerned about whether they could heat their homes during the winter. Journalists clamored for detailed background information. Other interest groups were looking for precise data to analyze in depth.
The BMK determined that a central place was needed to keep the public informed about gas prices and general energy data. The BMK envisioned a dashboard for all kinds of statistical information about the crisis. Soon, the original idea evolved into creating a whole website dedicated to providing all kinds of information around energy, from data and statistics to background information, tips for households, and more — energie.gv.at was born.
This website, and the energy dashboard in particular, has some requirements that would push off-the-shelf CMS solutions to their limits. Dashboard data has to be kept up-to-date, and new sources of information must be quickly integrated. Flexibility and extensibility were ranked high on the list of desired features.
Flexibility, extensibility, and openness are Sulu’s second nature
In their search for a solution that meets all their requirements, the BMK finally tasked datenwerk with building a new web presence from the ground up at energy.gv.at. datenwerk has proficient Sulu knowledge and used Sulu for several projects, including a website for Kinderfreunde, a lobbying organization for children's rights.
While the project initially was meant to focus on data around the natural gas crisis, the BMK soon wanted the CMS to collect and display more data from an increasing range of sources, such as
- natural gas prices (current and historical),
- gill levels of the country’s gasometers,
- gas imports by source country,
- power supply
- over time
- and by source (solar power, wind power, etc.),
- electricity price per MWh at the electricity exchange,
- energy consumption of private households by type.
As a result, the site turned from a crisis dashboard into a universal information portal on renewable energy.
However, amalgamating all those sources was only one step. The data had to be presented in a visually appealing way, by turning raw tabular data into charts and data widgets.
To address both requirements, datenwerk chose Sulu CMS as an open and flexible basis for energie.gv.at’s web presence.
On the data side, Sulu is open for integration at various levels and through numerous techniques. datenwerk decided to make use of the file system as the point of transfer. To collect data from all the diverse sources, the team wrote Symfony commands that connect to each source and turn the data into a unified JSON format, ready for consumption by Sulu.
For the visualization, datenwerk created custom content blocks in Sulu. This feature enables users to freely define how data is displayed on a web page. datenwerk integrated the D3.js framework with custom content blocks to create dynamic, accessible charts in various formats.
Putting all of these together, datenwerk created a highly informative, real-time dashboard to keep citizens informed about the state of energy supply in Austria.
Sulu is datenwerk’s choice for highly customizable websites
When clients ask to build a website beyond the standard content formats, datenwerk’s favorite option is Sulu CMS, for multiple reasons.
- Custom content blocks: Sulu allows CMS developers to create custom content blocks for editors, resulting in high flexibility in terms of layout options. For any desired page layout, Sulu developers can define custom content blocks that allow editors to directly provide suitable content, with no workarounds required.
These custom content blocks proved to be particularly useful for modeling the energy dashboard’s various visualizations. - A backend with built-in ease of use: After some suboptimal experience with CMS backends that they found to be overly complicated, datenwerk settled on using Sulu for larger CMS projects. Sulu’s backend is as user-friendly as, say, WordPress but as capable as that of more complex CMSs. A perfect balance especially for clients outside core IT.
- Performance out of the box: datenwerk have observed that website performance significantly increased the moment they switched to Sulu. With built-in speed-boosting features, such as caching, Sulu delivers pages fast and smoothly. Highly visible sites like Energy.gv.at that serve a whole nation benefit from systems for which performance is not an afterthought.
- Openness and flexibility: Sulu can be extended and customized almost without limits. As a native Symfony app, Symfony developers become immediately familiar with Sulu, reducing the onboarding time and cost to near zero. For the BMK, Sulu’s openness enabled datenwerk to design the best integration technique for the use case, instead of having to stick to the few options a proprietary system would offer.
- A great community: Sulu has a vibrant community, and datenwerk praises its Slack channel as a welcoming place where help is just a few keyboard taps away.
We are very happy about having Sulu CMS, which makes it easy for us to effectively and efficiently realize our Web projects.
Performance significantly increased after we switched to Sulu.
Sulu: A solid foundation for modern information portals
A website that informs the public during times of crisis (and even after the crisis is over) must run flawlessly. Sulu has proven to be a robust and reliable CMS that serves the information needs of a whole nation while easily adapting to any custom requirements. datenwerk is an innovative digital agency that takes Sulu’s potential to new heights.
