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Showcase: mein!KI.KA – A Safe Community for Kids

mein!KI.KA
Drupal for Business

Showcase: mein!KI.KA – A Safe Community for Kids

45 minutes (+15 minutes Q&A)

Room:

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In 2009 the TV channel "Kinderkanal" (KI.KA) launched its community "mein!KI.KA" based on Drupal (http://www.mein-kika.de). KI.KA is the German children's channel of the public television channels of ARD and ZDF. It provides one of the largest and most successful Internet service sites for children in all of Germany.

In this presentation, the project leaders Jutta Horstmann (technical implementation and development team leader) and Tobias Freudenreich (conceptual design and overall project leader KI.KA) will talk about their experiences in building a successful and safe community for children and the lessons learned.

After a guided tour of the community, we will present the project's requirements: The topics security, data privacy protection, accessibility and performance improvement dominated the agenda during the development phase.

Several examples showcase the custom module development for mein!KI.KA:

  • users can delete their own account (some posts remain anonymous, others are deleted completely; some user information is kept for later statistics)
  • "Opening hours“ (users may only login during defined „office hours“)
  • special features for moderating user generated content (everything has to be read by adults before being accepted or denied publication)

All contrib and custom modules were thoroughly tested with regards to their security. We are going to discuss Drupal security features (e.g. forms API and database API), tools and modules that increase security of Drupal modules (e.g. coder, security scanner).

Next we will examine Drupal's strengths and weaknesses in implementing these requirements. We will go into detail about how Drupal made the implementation easier and where it held back progress, both from the developer's point of view as well as the customer's.

We will close our session with some remarks regarding project management and the software development process in a project of this size and complexity.

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