News and Blog Site
If the McIntire web ecosystem was a high school lunchroom, this WordPress blog would be the popular kid’s slightly less cool sidekick. It’s not sexy like the Javascript frontends, but it wields a ton of power, and without it, the system can’t really function.
The Challenge
Let’s take a trip back to 2018. McIntire had a series of WordPress blogs in place – they were dated, reliant on hordes of third-party plugins, isolated in silos, and a pain to use. But the content was good and becoming a more important part of the school's outreach and marketing strategy. So we went to the drawing board to figure out how we could make it better – better for readers, better for authors, and better for the Google bots. This meant we needed to create something portable, scalable, easy to use, and on-brand.
System Design
A well-structured platform designed for sharing
There are probably 50 different ways we could have tackled it, but ultimately we chose to create a standard WordPress site that supports a multitude of discrete content areas and types. We created custom post types and dedicated user roles in order to avoid clutter and option overload and to facilitate an author-edit-publish workflow. These “faux blogs” give the illusion of a dedicated resource while sharing a common taxonomy, codebase, and endpoint.
WordPress
CircleCI
Composer
Webpack
Sass
PantheonSystem Feature
A taxonomy to rule them all
A lot of thought went into developing a taxonomy system that would allow us to create specific content feeds on any number of pages and sites. WordPress was the inaugural implementation, but now this same taxonomy is leveraged in a number of data-generating and data-consuming apps...cheers for standardization! Pair this taxonomy with the WP REST API and instantly you have a reliable way to cross-pollinate content. Single source of truth, baby.
System Feature
Flexible and straightforward content management
Our enterprise content management system is Drupal -- it’s great for many things, but in our opinion, leaves much to be desired when it comes to the content authoring experience. For high-volume, high-frequency editorial content, WordPress was the clear winner largely because of the admin interface. We’ve added some customizations to make it even better, and we use ACF to support a modular, component-based approach.
UI Elements
Easy on the eyes
While the content is largely consumed in other applications, we’ve worked hard to make sure the native views are just as delightful. To maximize readability, the look and feel is clean and minimal, with some subtle little enhancements woven throughout.
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