Completely Rebuilding The Morning News

New articles every day. Numerous categories. A devoted readership. And a six-year-old CMS.

The Morning News had built up a huge following since inception, but publishing required the staff to resort to workarounds and hacks. They needed us to completely rebuild their site.

Vector Media Group’s Solution

Although the variety of content types and hard publication deadlines made The Morning News’ problems challenging, we’d seen these problems before. We knew that we could deliver a customized ExpressionEngine-powered site that met their needs.

While Jason Santa Maria designed the site and Trent Walton built the front-end, we got to work developing a customized back-end interface that would let The Morning News staffers easily input content and define the content type, which automatically determined the look of the piece.

But how would we get there? A poor migration can foil even the best CMS customization. So we created a script that would retrieve content from the old CMS and import it (over ten thousand articles) into the new one. We also set up redirects to prevent broken links. The migration process was simple and painless.

The Result

Now, The Morning News has a beautiful site that’s a pleasure to read—and a pleasure for the TMN staff to use. They have more fine-grained control over the way articles are formatted on the site, and don’t have to know HTML to format and design each article.

Meanwhile, authors have complete creative freedom to style text and images the way they want.

They had this to say:

“It’s no overstatement to say that Vector Media Group transformed the way The Morning News publishes. Over the course of a complicated redesign project involving 10 years of content archives and legacy code, Vector consulted with us to arrive at the smartest solutions, managed every last detail, and delivered a final product that has performed far beyond our expectations.

Thanks to their work, we’re publishing in a format customized to our processes, making us—within days of the relaunch—more efficient than ever before. We’re already looking forward to working with Vector on future upgrades and enhancements to the site.”  - Andrew Womack, Founding Editor, The Morning News