The Christian Science Monitor

Global in practice and spirit, The Christian Science Monitor is an international news organization that delivers thoughtful, global coverage via its website, weekly magazine, Daily News Briefing, email newsletters, and mobile site.

Problem

The Christian Science Monitor was transferring their daily print edition completely online, and in order to accomplish this needed to publish articles efficiently, intuitively, and around the clock. They required multiple levels of editors and contributors to be able to add content across the site from a centralized location, without unnecessary steps or workflow.

Solutions

eZ Publish’s out of the box functionality would provide the answer to the areas lacking in their current content management system. Through a massive content migration (20+ years of content) and customization of eZ’s editing and workflow interfaces, eZ Publish allowed for more effective content organization and greatly expanded functionality on both the backend and front-facing site.

Results

Implementing eZ Publish required integrating the following features, among others:

•    eZ Flow (this allowed for the movement of blocks around pages, as well as scheduling and previews)
•    eZ Web Interface and eZ Find (provided a front-end, browser-based interface and effective search engine powered by Apache Solr)
•    Archives (served 1980-2007 content from a separate instance of eZ Publish)
•    Syndication (provided public RSS feeds through FeedBurner and multiple subscription formats on demand)
•    Advertising and Social Media (Burst Media, Ads by Google, Omniture, DirectoryM, Facebook, IntenseDebate)
•    Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN)
•    Smooth migration of existing URLs to their new locations (CSMonitor.com has over 100,000 articles indexed in Google)
•    Use of MySQL replication to improve performance and scalability of the site. Future performance gains can be realized by adding additional web or database servers seamlessly.

These features replicated their existing site’s qualities while providing new, better ways to make regular updates and administer page layouts.  Changing the skeleton also changed the site’s look and feel: the previous design was hard-coded, which meant every change had to be manual and did not allow for ease or consistency in styling. Duo helped implement the design they created so that it was as clean, flexible, and appealing as the content it housed.

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