NWsource: Articles & Authors

Responsibilities

visual design, Drupal (CMS) development, PHP, accessibility, web standards, XHTML, CSS

As the depth and breadth of content on NWsource grew to meet a greater selection of reader interests, it became increasingly difficult to maintain and successfully promote content across the site. The obvious solution was to introduce a content management system which would streamline the editorial and productions process.

The team evaluated a number of existing systems and found Drupal to be the best existing CMS to meet our needs. Drupal was already being used by other winning news sites (e.g. the Onion and New York Observer), and being an open source project, it came at a price no one could refuse. Even better is that it's supported by a vast community of developers who have created some fantastic modules.

Baby steps

Though a full site redesign was being planned, it would take some time to accomplish and we wanted to get the editorial team up and running with the CMS as soon as possible. Therefore, we chose to launch articles with the existing site design with the addition of author and column pages. We began by porting all existing articles into Drupal from their various databases and any legacy articles that were built statically. It was a lot of content and required a lot of care to import it successfully.

A fresh face

While we were keeping the same site wrapper and navigation, we wanted to update the look and feel of the content. Increasing the font-size and leading, slightly reducing the contrast of the type, and opening up the page grid helped to ease the readability of the page. We also added commenting to all articles (many legacy articles didn't have this feature) and offered community tagging.

By adapting this crucial piece of our site to the CMS, we were able to quickly improve the editorial work flow and also offer up some great community features without the wait of an entire site redesign and rebuild.