FiscoOggi

FiscoOggi.it is the Revenue Agency’s online magazine that offers updates on the activity of the Administration and its central and peripheral offices, comments on legislation, practice and tax jurisprudence. Ample space is also dedicated to international taxation with an analysis of the taxation systems and tax innovations of the various countries. FiscoOggi.it aims to be a timely and punctual information tool, available to taxpayers and professional operators.

More than 10 million users with over 22 million accesses and 40 million page views in the last 3 years, with about 28,000 subscribers to the newsletter and with a constantly growing trend: in 2018 alone almost 4 million of users and more than 14 million pageviews. With these numbers comes FiscoOggi, the most authoritative and long-lived Italian online publication in the field of taxation which offers accurate and timely information edited directly by Agenzia delle Entrate.

Being able to count on an editorial staff of 12 officials and almost 600 authors, the contents published in the magazine exceed 5000 per year, posing a double challenge for us at SparkFabrik: to migrate what is already in place to a new and modern platform and facilitate the work of the editorial staff in the production and insertion of contents by working on the user experience on the editorial side.

At the same time, the goal of coping with the ever-increasing use of the site on mobile devices (+24% in the last year) requires particular attention to a clear and hierarchical presentation of the contents.

Design and user experience

Considering the requests from the customer that emerged during the tender phase, our design proposal included an in-depth analysis of the platforms of the main players in online publishing, and a timely application of best practices in the field of user experience and accessibility.

Being a purely content site, user usability was a priority during interface and interaction design. First of all, we increased the size of the titles compared to the body text and increased the color contrast with the background to favor a better visual hierarchy of the contents.

In this phase, a substantial decluttering of the graphic interface was also carried out, giving air to the contents without sacrificing their richness and favoring a geometric and harmonious representation.

The choice of fonts to use fell on a trio of sans-serif characters: Montserrat for the titles, Open Sans for the body text and Titillium Web for the interactive elements. These are three fonts that are widely used and highly legible, with a vast variety of weights that have allowed us to adapt them optimally to the various situations of use.

Drupal 8 as a framework

The ideal candidate for the modernization of the platform was undoubtedly Drupal 8, a modern, modular and enterprise-class framework, moreover a choice of continuity as a successor of the platform behind the previous instance of Pressflow (Drupal 6) now obsolete.

The transition to this version constituted an enhancement of the editor’s user experience, allowing to dispose of an antiquated and cumbersome workflow in favor of one in line with the latest web technologies. The flexibility of the customizable editorial flows offered by Drupal 8 has made it possible to fully satisfy the needs of the editorial staff. The content editing and creation pages have been customized, semantically grouping the elements into tabs (field groups) and adding comments and notes to guide the editor in his daily work.

The newly migrated Drupal 8 API has allowed the migration of contents directly from Drupal 6, allowing the optimization of data structures, facilitated by the new entity typology: files, images, videos and audios have been remapped in media types and the architecture of existing content types was rationalized. In total, the migration involved over 42,000 contents, 35,000 images and 2,700 multimedia contributions including video, audio and photos, and the writing of various destination and process plugins.

A feature of the previous site, considered a priority by the editorial staff, was a content ranking system that allowed to show the most read articles of the day, recently and all time. The system was based on a contrib module (Radioactivity) which was not compatible with Drupal 8 at the initial stage of the project. Our efforts therefore focused on developing a new version of the module which was compatible with the new site and in migrating the ranking values ​​of all existing content. The architectural optimizations introduced with the migrations have therefore made it possible to manage the images as “media entities”, allowing the creation of a centralized “repository” which facilitates their recovery and possibly reuse (with the use of contrib modules such as “Entity media browser” and “Entity embed”) with a shared pattern in all operations involving photographs and images.

Integration with audio and video streaming server Wowza has been improved and implemented in HTML5, adding support for modern streaming protocols, MPEG-DASH, HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and maintaining an Adobe Flash fallback for older browsers.

For the front-end it was decided to maintain a native Drupal approach, which by exploiting the versatility of Twig, the new Drupal 8 template engine, made it possible to easily integrate the responsive mobile-first Zurb Foundation framework, modular and easily customizable as well as adhering to accessibility standards. The images have been optimized for the different resolutions through the use of the Picture tag and a set of presets studied in detail to offer the best user experience at all resolutions, on retina devices or not, without weighing down the page loading.

The search has maintained the original integration with Apache Solr, assigning a boost of relevance to the most recent content: the faceted “navigation” that allows the user to quickly and intuitively filter content semantically and by type it has also been extended to all the contents of the media section.

A first and evident result is on the User Experience side. From the in-depth analysis carried out on the structure of the old site, we were able to significantly shorten the user path for accessing the contents.

Giving some examples:

• The search within the site has been centralized, allowing for a more immediate use. The search results have been optimized and weighted according to the critical parameters for an editorial publication.
• Access to multimedia content (audio, video, gallery) has also been merged into a single coherent interface both from a graphic point of view and in terms of usage patterns, standardizing the user-side experience. At the same time we passed from a legacy way of video streaming to a modern HTML5 stream in line with today's standards.
• Access to the Country Files (containing a summary of the local tax system) has been simplified, developing from scratch a new User Interaction. The user can access the contents of his interest more quickly and precise, skipping redundant intermediate steps.
• The interaction with the tax schedule has been revised, leading to a restructuring that has allowed us to make access to the next deadlines simpler and clearer for the user, switching from a calendar view to one per diary.

The second major achievement is undoubtedly the migration of a large amount of structured content from a legacy platform like Drupal 6 to a modern platform like Drupal 8.

By combining an in-depth analysis of the previous data structure with our knowledge of the potential of Drupal 8, we have managed not only to make all the contents of the old platform available, but to present and structure them in a modern and future-proof way.