Clarity Media Group needed a serious upgrade to the CMS they used for their online publishing business the Washington Examiner. After successfully launching the Examiner’s Campaign 2012 site, Phase2 was approached by the Clarity Media Group again to implement a highly customized version of OpenPublish to provide the performance and stability the Washignton Examiner needed to keep their newsroom functioning.
Our first step was to replace the legacy D6 CMS. The previous system presented issues regarding stability for the editorial team despite a bevy of hardware. The old system required 16 webservers, yet was constantly crashing.
According to Chief Digital Officer at Clarity Media Group, Bob Benz, "A year ago, our CMS was inflicting major pain on our journalists and business people. When traffic surged, our site crashed. Updating content was complicated and buggy. To say we hated our CMS would be an understatement.
We brought in Phase2 to fix the problem. They helped us roll out a new system that leverages Drupal 7 to maximum benefit. After the launch, we had one of our largest traffic surges ever, and the site handled the load beautifully. Our journalists don't have to worry about the system crashing when they're in the middle of updating content. Now we can focus on our business instead of our technology."
By working closely with the Washington Examiner to develop a better way to process offline publishing system content, our team was able to reduce hosting costs significantly. Excess webservers were eliminated, and the editorial team immediately experienced an improvement in performance.
The Phase2 design team also tackled the UX & design giving the Washington Examiner’s site an updated look that paid homage to the hallmarks of the brand. Phase2 Design Director Samantha Warren commented on working on the site, “It was really exciting collaborating with an organization that is so passionate about transforming their visual brand online. Working with the Washington Examiner was a pleasure; they have a beautiful logo, a hard working team, and the leadership that lends itself to facilitating a successful design product. “
Our team managed the large-scale content migration, built a flexible layout structure for content managers, and developed a feeds processing engine to allow for powerful influx of content from newsfeeds without affecting performance or stability.
