#diwd Moving The Economist to the Drupal Web CMS

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Dec 10, 2009

Deciding that you need a content management system is a no-brainer for online publishers. And given the veritable financial bloodbath happening in the publishing industry — thanks to the drop in advertising revenue — it shouldn't come as a surprise that the idea of a free, open source CMS holds a great deal of appeal. However, in the case of The Economist, it didn't start out this way.

There's Legacy and there's Legacy

When the publication was founded in 1928 there were no computers, let alone a World Wide Web. Until recently, their web presence lived on a custom-built CMS that sat on a proprietary, Microsoft-based stack including Cold Fusion and Oracle. Bolted on were additional applications such as Movable Type and Pluk.

Unfortunately, their entire process at that point was broken. Rob Purdie, Scrum Practice Leader for The Economist, described it as waterfall in style and yet causing frequent firefighting. They needed to become:

More responsive to change
Able to deliver business value sooner
More sustainable

In order to achieve these goals, they didn't need just better technology (though they needed that too). They also need improved processes, organizational structure and culture.

The Plan

The decision was made to proceed in two different ways. Updates would be made both iteratively, and incrementally. Rather than one huge move, they'd take the site over piece by piece, improving as they went, so they could quickly add value to the business. The philosophy "perfect is the enemy of better" was the name of the game.

Their work began by looking over the existing Web CMS space. What were the leading platforms? What were other newspapers using? Major options appeared to be to build a new custom platform, purchase a proprietary system, or go free and open source.

It turned out that for their needs (community and content publishing), Drupal was a perfect fit. It offered a robust development framework and a development language (PHP) that had a large developer community. Java solutions in particular were avoided because they felt that the developers would be too expensive.

Getting Geared Up

First they had to sell the idea internally. As Purdie put it, "There is no suit-wearing Drupal salesforce." Instead, they'd have to make the internal case on their own.

They began by attending Drupalcon Boston 2008, networking with the community and learning more about the platform. Then Purdie arranged Drupal workshops and training with Lullabot.

Rather than trying to do this all on their own, he brought on Moshe Weitzman of Cyrve. Weitzman is a long-time fixture in the Drupal community, having been a Drupal core developer since before there was a Drupal.org. Together they built a Proof of Concept that consisted of an article page in Drupal using CCK (CCK is the Content Construction Kit add-on module for Drupal, it has been largely integrated into Drupal 7 core) for a rich article content type, and mocked up channel pages for site sections.

This mix of old and new sites would also require a creative approach to hosting. They identified two different possibilities for how they might bridge the two systems until the migration was complete.

The Economist had two options, to funnel everything through a proxy or use subdomains.

In the beginning they would entirely use the proxy method. As features matured, some could be moved to the sub-domain method. And once the migration was complete, they could retire both options.