Building a multilingual CMS with granular rights for HLS

The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) is the only online encyclopedia dedicated exclusively to Swiss history. It provides synthesized historical research and multimedia sources in all four of Switzerland's official languages: German, French, Italian, and partly in Romansh. The articles, written by scientists and peer-reviewed by experts, are curated by an editorial team of about 20 staff members.

The dictionary serves as a reliable research infrastructure for the scientific community and a comprehensive and appealing information service for the public. HLS attracts approximately 1.74 million unique visitors per year, with daily visits ranging between 5,000 and 8,000. It is part of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW) and is funded through national grants.

HLS launched its public website, built with PHP, in 1998. However, as the Internet evolved, the platform's outdated backend and frontend became a challenge.

They needed a more modern solution with a user-friendly interface, multilingual support, and media integration for articles. Additionally, migrating their encyclopedia from a custom XML-based system, originally designed for print, to a scalable, flexible platform became essential.

After evaluating several options for their content management system (CMS) and discovering key limitations — risky dependencies, poor collaboration tools, and failure to meet specific requirements — HLS concluded that a wiki would be a better solution. Wikis offer pre-existing quality management processes, are often used for encyclopedic work, allow flexibility of content, and make it easy for external authors to contribute. With this in mind, HLS selected XWiki in 2017 to deliver a proof of concept (POC).

XWiki stood out among other competing wikis by seamlessly integrating both CMS and wiki features, offering a well-structured data approach that included articles, text, media, and references, alongside the option for JIRA integration for workflow tracking. Additionally, it provided a user-friendly CKEditor, multilingual support, versioning, and commenting functionality, while its open-source nature, coupled with strong backing from XWiki SAS, guaranteed long-term sustainability of the platform.

Lastly, it's powerful SOLR search engine, scalability, and customizable workflows made XWiki the clear choice for HLS’s backend and public-facing platform, meeting their evolving needs for years to come.

The HLS team was looking for an advanced CMS that could provide granular access controls and custom workflows, as well as the capability to support the creation of a highly tailored new public website. The new solution had to be able to:

The partnership between HLS and XWiki has led to the development of numerous key features and enhancements that have greatly improved the platform's user experience. These include streamlined workflows, advanced search capabilities, and intuitive interfaces. These improvements attract more users and encourage repeated visits, contributing to an impressive total of 1.74 million unique visitors per year.

During this complex project, our team developed many essential features that enriched and optimized HLS's CMS and user experience:

Complex workflows

Custom workflows integrated with JIRA allow direct article validation in the XWiki instance, with statuses stored in JIRA.

Inline editing

Editors can compose articles and integrate text and media within a single document, enhancing efficiency during the review process.

Image handling

The updated image plugin supports additional formats, including SVGs, and uses the srcset attribute for device-optimized display.

Revamped search interface

The search user interface now includes filtering by categories, dates, and other criteria, offering better user feedback and experience.

Hierarchical facets

Implemented for managing taxonomy, hierarchical facets ensure complete data retrieval and enhance navigation accuracy.

Search navigation

Users can navigate results without returning to the search page, as result sets are stored in the browser for quick access to previous and next articles.

Advanced versioning

HLS maintains historical articles in date-specific spaces, ensuring easy access to the latest content while optimizing SEO indexing.

Feedback Form Application

Users can provide feedback directly in the wiki, making it particularly useful for public websites, such as HLS.

HLS’s transition to XWiki marked a major improvement in their content management and editorial processes. By choosing XWiki, HLS modernized their platform, benefiting from greater flexibility, scalability, sophisticated content management capabilities, and a great UX.

The new system not only supports efficient workflows for the editorial team but also delivers a high-performance, user-friendly public website that meets their complex content and search needs.