Quick overview of Labrador CMS - What is it?
Labrador CMS Product Offering
Explore Labrador CMS, a full-stack publishing platform designed to streamline your tech stack, speed up publishing, and reduce costs.
Labrador CMS is a prebuilt full-stack publishing platform exclusively for professional media. It offers all the flexibility you expect in a headless system and includes a front-end rendering engine. The system is designed to speed up publishing, simplify your tech stack, and enable publishers to reduce costs. It is delivered as Software as a Service. This means that we maintain the core code for you with continuous upgrades at no additional cost.
The CMS
Labrador CMS runs in the browser and is hosted in the cloud by our professional hosting partners. Editors and reporters access the system by single sign-on, either Google Account or Microsoft AD (now Entra ID).
Reporters write their stories directly into the page template, enabling a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) experience with a mobile-first approach. Content is stored automatically in the background while you edit. Users can style the article and add images, slideshows, graphics, and videos. The system can automatically generate summaries, translations, SoMe and SEO text, titles, and captions using AI in any language. This speeds up publishing while respecting the manually written article.
Users can access the high-res original image in the editor when placing images on articles and front pages. This enables zooming and cropping, and the system supports different crops on desktops and mobile devices. You can also manipulate images, change hue and saturation, create a “red circle” on top of an image, add a gradient, and place text on top of the images. In some places, you can also have images in images. The included image server automatically ensures the right crop is always used.
When ready for publishing, the article is sent for approval using the approval process of your choice. A typical workflow would be draft, ready for approval, approved, and published. The system supports articles that will be automatically published in the future.
Labrador CMS has a world-class front-page editing tool built into the system. While maintaining full flexibility over layout, brand design, and page composition, the system supports fully manual or fully automatic front pages. You can also combine these modes, having some automated placeholders where the content flows through with some manually placed stories on the same page. Subsections and tag pages are created automatically.
We also support personalized content. This can be solved in several ways. We can render personalized plugs based on the customer's custom data layer using our flexible rendering engine. We can also deliver recommended stories for you or perform similar functions.
If customers have several front-page editors working at the same time, we suggest a workflow where the subeditors work on subfrontpages, e.g., sports, that deliver stories to the main page.
The Built-in DAM
Labrador CMS has a built-in Digital Asset Management system that mainly supports images. 5 Terabytes of storage are included for free. More storage is optional.
The Labrador DAM stores all your pictures in original high-res format. This allows for cropping and zooming. When an article is exported for reuse in print, all the full high-res images attached are sent to the print system, including images not placed on the web article but still attached to the article in the CMS.
You can use the built-in DAM system for any images that are in production and will be published on any channel. If you have a lot of images that should be stored but not used, we still recommend you use a separate DAM system for this. Labrador will help you integrate any external or internal DAM system. We will also integrate your image wire services or stock photo services. The system already comes with access to free stock photos from Pixabay.
The Labrador DAM system is connected to the Labrador Image Server, which, based on your editorial users' input and your design, generates the proper version, crop, and resolution of all images for all channels. This happens live, also in editing, and is cached on our front servers for lightning-fast delivery to end users.
Developer Platform and Frontend Developer Framework
Labrador is a fully programmable CMS. We offer the Labrador Developer Platform for large sites and large media groups. This gives you access to custom development on the CMS (the editor) and the Front end-user pages. You can create your own functions, your own layout tweaks, or your own integrations.
Developers will be provided with personal developer servers and a staging environment. You also get access to a full two-way API, and Team Labrador will train your developers and set up a shared Slack channel for direct communication. We also have a developer support center and a Developer Documentation Chatbot for first-level developer support. With the Labrador Developer Platform, you also get full access to the unique Labrador Rendering Engine that supports fast rendering of all your content. The rendering engine supports rendering both Labrador content and external content.
The Frontend
Labrador CMS is a full-stack CMS that fully hosts your entire website. The CMS and the Front-End Servers are hosted in the cloud. We use Amazon AWS and OVH Cloud. AWS runs millions of servers across 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions around the world.The French company OVH Cloud operates 500,000 servers in 37 data centers in 140 countries. There are no limits on traffic or geography; we can host any site with any traffic volume. We already deliver several billion pageviews to our customers every month.
Labrador CMS also includes caching. We use Varnish as a middleman between your users and our cached content. We use AWS CloudFront to provide CDN on edge-locations close to your audience. All these and other layers and custom magic also make up our DDoS and hacker protection.
Our infrastructure and backend team will help you with any special requests, such as custom cache layers, and also help you decide on the primary geographic server location.
The Integrations
Normally, Labrador CMS delivers the system with pre-built integrations of the customer's choice. We have working integrations with a large number of partners that we usually reuse in new projects.AI: There is a built-in integration with Open AI Chat GPT 4 Turbo. For flexibility and customer preferences, integrations with Claude 3 and Gemini 1.5 will also be added. Advanced customers can add their own custom AI models.
Content Planning: For larger organizations, we sometimes recommend integrations with Slack and/or DeskNet for advanced planning needs. External planning flows can be integrated with APIs and WebHooks.
Paywall: We integrate with all significant paywalls such as Piano and Zephr and local players like Flowy, Mediaconnect, Infosoft, Sesamy, Poool. If the customer has a custom or homebuilt paywall, we also integrate with that.
Print: Labrador supports a digital-first workflow and articles can be sent to print, including high-resolution images, or you can search in Labrador from your print system. We already have this integration for Aptoma, Roxen, native InDesign, and more systems. We can connect to any print system, also custom home built solutions.
Newsletter: Labrador integrates directly to many newsletter providers. The newsletters are created in Labrador with a simple user interface. You can add article teasers and manual written text. You can preview the page before sending it to your newsletter system of Choice, i.e. Mailmojo, Mailchimp etc.
Ad Systems: We add your ad system of choice. Lots of publishers use Google Ad Manager either directly or through a third party like Holid, Livewrapped, Pubmatic, Quickwrap, or Snigel, which also offers ad-prebidding and other advanced setups. The system automatically inserts ads in content and supports more ads in longer stories and higher density on mobile if desired. We also collaborate with Adnuntius. If you prefer another ad provider, we will implement that.
Data layers: Labrador comes with a standard, simple integration with Kilkaya to provide Top Lists and A/B tests. We can also connect with any other data layer, such as Piano Analytics, Google Analytics, Chartbeat, or Smartocto. We can also connect with your custom data layer if desired.
Personalization: Personalization can be done easily or in a complicated way. For Labrador CMS, we can provide a simple Kilkaya personalization built-in, or you can choose your own algorithm and just let us know what content you want us to render for your users.
APPs: Several customers of Labrador CMS have bought standard mobile apps from vendors ranging from low-cost Automagi to high-end Pug Pig. You can show all Labrador content as mobile web-pages without a header and footer to make it app-friendly, or you can go all in using JSON feeds and APIs and go for a headless approach in a native mobile app.News wires: We connect through resellers and directly to wire agencies. We support direct feeds, including images, enabling quick publishing. We also support the automatic publishing of wire content if you are allowed to do that. Image services: Free Pixabay images and DAM system is built in. We connect to image services like Getty Images and Scanpix (AP, Reuters, AFP). We also connect to your existing DAM system or image archive.
Epaper: Yes, we have that too. Just name your vendor.Video: There is a sample YouTube integration in place, but we integrate with your inhouse video system the same way. We also have integrations with other video systems, like JW Player.
These are just examples of systems we integrate with.
