Thunder & Lightning — Drupal distributions for media and publishing

What is the latest business forecast for the media and publishing industry? The thunder and lightning of success! This is because Drupal has very useful web solutions for this industry.

In addition to easy content editing in Drupal 8 and other niceties, there are Drupal distributions for media and publishing. They are called Thunder and Lightning, and we will now discuss what they can give you.

What are Drupal distributions?

Distributions are meant to start a website with significant time and cost savings. This is because Drupal distributions are installation kits suited to specific business use cases.

These packages include the Drupal core, a set of contributed modules, specific configuration, and more. Distributions are free and ready to go. They can be customized and extended by development teams to meet your business needs.

Drupal distributions for media and publishing

Thunder and Lightning are very famous Drupal distributions for media and publishing. They sound like a pair of related projects, but they are actually from different creators. Let’s review the details of each of them.

Lightning — Drupal distribution for media and publishing

Lightning is a framework and a distribution in one. It empowers developers to build great authoring experiences. And it allows content editors and publishers to enjoy smooth, handy, and consistent workflows.

The Lightning distribution was developed by Acquia in 2016. It is a lightweight and extensible product provided with detailed documentation and recommendations. Lightning inherits the best Drupal practices and offers a set of modules without being overloaded by extraneous ones.

The distribution’s reliability is guaranteed by 60+ automated tests and by Drupal Security Team’s close attention. This makes it much safer to use than a selection of standalone modules.

The project is actively maintained and has seen its 8.x-4.001 version released in June 2019. Lightning is the most downloadable Drupal 8 distribution on drupal.org in general, not only among Drupal 8 distributions for media and publishing.

Key Lightning features for publishers

• Easy media management

Lightning includes the media management feature with the media library. Content publishers can upload images and videos from a PC or from a URL, save them to the library, or embed them into the content.

• Flexible editorial workflows

With Lightning, it is easy to streamline content workflows between different user roles in the team. Publishers can manage the existing ones, or create new content approval states.

• Handy content preview

Editors can enjoy a comprehensive content preview, including images and videos, before submitting it to the public.

• Drag-and-drop layouts

The handy drag-and-drop tools allow editors to shape their page layouts for different occasions. The layouts are responsive to mobile devices. 

• API for content sharing

 Lightning has a preconfigured API for exposing content to other applications in the JSON format, so your media website can go multichannel.

• Headless Lightning subprofile

The subprofile has the same features but also offers an interface for decoupled Drupal setup, which is a hot trend. According to Dane Powell, Senior Technical Architect at Acquia, both Lightning and Headless Lightning are a great choice for this architecture.

Thunder — Drupal distribution for media and publishing

The Thunder distribution is an out-of-the-box product to be used by professional media websites. On its official page, Thunder positions itself as a CMS (content management system) for professional publishing.

It includes a set of specific modules tailored to the needs of publishers. Similarly to Lightning, Thunder is free and open-source.

Thunder was created in 2016 by Hubert Burda Media. In addition to the Thunder Core Team, the project is maintained by partners from the Thunder Coalition such as Nexxt.tv, Acquia, Valiton, Facebook etc. that add their own custom features to it. The distribution’s creation was great news for the Drupal world.

And just like Lightning, Thunder is actively supported and has released it 8.x-2.4 version in June 2019.

Key Thunder features for publishers

• Flexible content creation

Publishers can create more than simple articles by adding elements like images, videos, galleries, Twitter cards, and more with a drag-and-drop tool. Media can be saved for further reuse.

• Content scheduling

Your content can be scheduled to show on the website at a given date and time or, on the contrary, to stop showing at a given time.

• Nexx.tv video player

Thunder features a high-performance Nexx.tv video player that allows publishers to control their videos across platforms and devices.

• Riddle tool for interactive content

There is a Riddle that allows you to create interactive content like quizzes, tests, and so on. This keeps users engaged and drives your traffic.

• Instant Articles by Facebook

With the Instant Articles feature by Facebook, publishers can create articles that will load instantly on mobile devices of Facebook app users. 

• The Infinity theme

This is a special theme created for media and publishing websites by InStyle. It allows website to present content and increase user engagement with infinite scrolling.

• Mobile-friendliness

The distribution allows publishers to work in the admin dashboard from any device. Users can enjoy a modern and flexible front-end design.

Get the best from Drupal distributions for media and publishing

These have been just a very brief rundown of the Lightning and Thunder capabilities. They both are built according to the best development practices and both can be a great base for your website.

Contact our Drupal development team and we will help you quickly setup a website upon one of these distributions. Let your media and publishing business flourish with a website that reflects its demands!