Engineering Studio Engineering Studio Flagship CERN partnership — seven years of Drupal engineering for global physics outreach
The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) is a CERN-coordinated global collaboration of scientists, educators, and communication specialists working to make particle physics — the science of matter, energy, space, and time — accessible to students, teachers, and the wider public worldwide. Since 2019, Kukarika has been IPPOG’s technology partner, building and maintaining the digital ecosystem behind its global outreach: a custom Drupal platform engineered to CERN’s standards, an automated content pipeline that pulls records from the CERN Document Server into IPPOG’s Resource Database, a globally-mapped members directory, and a set of standalone reviewer tools that help curators prepare and organise bibliographic records destined for the CERN Document Server. Seven years in, the partnership continues — the platform has expanded alongside IPPOG’s mission, and every release still flows through the same engineering team that started it.
A CERN-coordinated outreach organisation that had to ingest bibliographic records from CERN's central Document Server into its own outreach catalogue, give a volunteer reviewer community proper tooling to organise resources, render a globally-distributed membership on a real-world map, and meet a security baseline that doesn't flex for anyone.
Educational resources are catalogued in CERN's central Document Server (CDS). IPPOG needed those records pulled into its own outreach catalogue automatically — parsed, mapped, and stored as first-class content in IPPOG's Resource Database, with attribution and editorial context preserved.
Subject-matter reviewers needed standalone workspaces to organise, vet, and prepare bibliographic records that would eventually be entered into CDS — without working directly inside CERN's catalogue interface or hand-editing raw MARC XML.
IPPOG's members span dozens of countries — individual representatives, international experiments, laboratories, and associate members. Each had to appear in its right place on a single, navigable global map.
Hundreds of contributors worldwide, each with their own permissions, content responsibilities, and language preferences — managed without a brittle role matrix.
Coordinators needed real-time visibility into curation progress, reviewer activity, and resource throughput — not retroactive monthly spreadsheets.
The platform had to absorb new collaborations, new resource types, and new outreach campaigns across many years without rearchitecting from scratch.
Strict CERN security, reliability, and compliance requirements applied to every layer of the stack — hosting, deployment, code review, and dependency hygiene — with no exemptions.
A purpose-built Drupal platform engineered to CERN standards, anchored by the IPPOG Resource Database, an automated content pipeline pulling records from the CERN Document Server, a globally-rendered members map on OpenStreetMap, and a set of standalone reviewer tools that help curators prepare bibliographic records for CDS — all surfaced through interfaces designed for the volunteers who actually use them.
A flagship outreach platform that turns the moving parts of global particle-physics communication — automated bibliographic ingestion, volunteer curation, geographic membership, editorial workflow — into one coherent, CERN-grade digital home.
Seven years on, the IPPOG platform is the operational home of one of CERN's most ambitious outreach programmes. The Resource Database stays current with the CERN Document Server because new CDS records flow into IPPOG automatically, attribution intact. Standalone reviewer tools let curators prepare the other side of that catalogue — records destined for CDS — in a clean structured interface instead of raw MARC XML.
The interactive global map turns dozens of countries' worth of contributors into a single coherent picture. And the partnership continues — every new collaboration, new feature, and new release still flows through the same engineering hands that have shaped this platform since 2019.