Parents.com provides expert advice about pregnancy and parenthood from the editors of Parents Magazine. A lot of expert advice. Covering such significant topics meant there was a sea of content coming from quite a few systems. While already familiar with Drupal, Meredith Corporation called on Chromatic's expertise for additional help.
Our collaboration began with on-site meetings. It was immediately clear that there would be many interesting challenges. The on-site in Des Moines, IA allowed the teams to get to know each other and to begin to form a plan. The next seven months were spent iterating on and executing that plan.
Meredith had other projects underway and needed our team to work somewhat autonomously at first. We did just that, asking endless questions as we went to ensure that we were delivering what they needed. We first constructed the data model before migrating their existing content. The custom migrations then ingested content from legacy systems. Other portions of the site continued to live in other systems, presenting additional challenges.
As their other projects wrapped up and their focus shifted towards Parents.com, more of their team was able to join ours. As the team grew, our agile workflow evolved to ensure it remained as efficient as possible. Their team hadn't worked with a distributed team before, but that didn't slow anything down. Together we achieved a significant amount of progress in a small amount of time. We tackled the remaining challenges; such as SEO, performance, and building a theme used by multiple systems. Most important of all, we built a lasting relationship.
The end result is the successful launch of Parents.com, built primarily with Drupal. We couldn't be more proud. Check it out and be watching for more technical follow up posts!
