Websites of the German Alpine Club | Chameleon Shop and CMS

technical implementation, hosting and maintenance: ESONO AG
editorial system: Chameleon CMS
frontend concept, design and framework: Coma AG
http://www.alpenverein.de

The website of the German Alpine Club is mouthpiece and source of information at the same time for one of the biggest clubs in Germany with approximately 1 million members.

Several factors had to be taken into account for a successful relaunch of the club’s website: Comprehensive contents need to be changed easily and at any time by different editors. At the same time both the content management system as well as the underlying hosting services have to maintain its stable performance in times of high traffic. Moreover, the website shall be delivered optimally for different display sizes and offer users an interesting and exciting online experience.

These requirements could be met by using:

the Chameleon content management system with innovative teaser and image management
a dynamic teaser concept
a scalable AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud-based hosting
MemcacheD as object caching
a separate webserver for static contents for CDN (content delivery network) distribution

Websites of the German Alpine Club

Apart from these requirements, which are typical for high traffic websites, the webpage of the Alpine Club offers more specifics for its visitors:

integration of the DAV service mountain weather by connecting real time weather data from the Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics
a cabin search, which can be accessed intuitively and makes it easy to find the right cabin for a tour in the Alps
the rating portal cabin test for more than 1,000 serviced and unmanaged DAV and private cabins, using a complex valuation logic
a search to find the local sub-division of the Alpine Club
integration of a third party search system for the DAV service rock info to find the best spots for rock climbing
deep integration of Google Maps Services to enable referencing of geographic coordinates from every editorial context
secure member area with forum and user groups, which can be controlled by a differentiated assignment of user rights and downloads
intelligent article administration with the Chameleon article module for editorial contents in order to avoid content duplication and to manage the large number of contents
ad server and tracking integration to providers such as Adition, IVW and Google Analytics
content-type-sensitive search to present search results according to the content type in a structured and easily accessible way

In addition to the Alpine Club’s homepage, the Esono AG maintains and supports further websites of the association such as various pages of subdivisions, the website of the Youth of the German Alpine Club JDAV and many more.

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