Stellantis Media
Worldwide media management platform for the Stellantis group, for distributing media assets to journalists and global stakeholders.
Challenge
Modernization of the Stellantis group's media management solution. The existing platform was a custom PHP CMS, now obsolete and difficult to maintain, no longer meeting the needs of a global automotive group.
Solution
Complete redesign and development of the platform using the Symfony framework, with particular focus on performance and scalability. The platform is used worldwide by the group for managing and distributing media assets to journalists and stakeholders.
Requirements no off-the-shelf product covered
Work started from gathering the group's requirements on four topics which, taken together, ruled out adopting a market CMS: content embargo handling, publication rules, worldwide availability of materials, and server load limits.
Embargo in particular is not a checkbox. It is a constraint that has to hold on every path to the content, including internal previews and distribution to markets in different time zones: an embargoed asset must not be reachable early by any route, not even by someone who knows the direct URL.
Why a rewrite rather than maintenance
The previous platform was a custom PHP CMS, by then obsolete, hard to maintain and no longer aligned with the needs of a global automotive group. On a codebase in that state, every new publication rule becomes a graft that increases risk instead of reducing it.
The choice was a ground-up redesign on Symfony, which in the document management domain offers explicit structure for permissions, publication cycles and workflows. The benefit is not initial development speed — it is that a complex access rule stays readable years later.
Distribution and load
The platform is used group-wide worldwide to manage and distribute media assets to journalists and stakeholders. The resulting load profile is not uniform: publishing an announcement generates spikes concentrated into a few minutes, with simultaneous downloads of large files.
MariaDB handles structured data and Redis provides the caching layer, so the repeated requests that precede and follow an announcement do not all reach the database.