Farm Journal, a prominent agricultural media company, faced significant technical challenges with their decoupled legacy infrastructure. As a large-scale media organization, with 28+ unique brands to manage, their collection of digital properties was essential to their operations, but the technical complexities of maintaining a disparate and disconnected ecosystem were slowing down their ability to innovate and placing undue burden on their internal team. Farm Journal sought the expertise of Chromatic to streamline operations, reduce costs, and optimize the performance of their web platforms.
Farm Journal’s original Node.js-based content distribution platform was unorganized, outdated, and ineffective. Many of their brands, each with its own digital property, were developed individually, without sharing configurations and styling, raising difficulties and substantial overhead in the maintenance and development of new features across the network. Farm Journal’s web infrastructure was heavily reliant on AWS, an expensive and cumbersome solution for their needs. This tangle created a series of difficult-to-manage and tough-to-navigate user experiences, and more severely, missed ad revenue opportunities. The costs associated with maintaining their web presence were skyrocketing, and their internal team was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of maintenance work required to keep their sites operational. This burden prevented them from focusing on strategic initiatives and new product development. The lack of whole-page caching and a suboptimal deployment process further complicated matters, leading to performance inefficiencies and slowing down the ability to roll out updates across their multiple web properties.
Starting with a thorough diagnostic review of Farm Journal’s existing ecosystem, we identified and remediated the points of failure in their decoupled architecture. Under a new cohesive brand identity, Chromatic transformed Farm Journal’s disjointed Node.js system into a unified, scalable content distribution platform on Drupal that accounted for the varying needs of their many departments and brands. With the new platform in place, we then guided Farm Journal through a multi-site migration to Drupal, deploying many new properties in the process.
Leveraging Drupal as the content distribution system and as the content management system, Chromatic created an entire content distribution ecosystem that grants Farm Journal editors and admins complete visibility into all their digital properties and near real-time distribution capabilities for each of its brands. This improved usability, loading times, and ad visibility and targeting. The now single codebase provides Farm Journal developers with minimal overhead and plenty to scale in the future.
While the migration presented challenges, particularly in managing relationships with third-party service providers, Farm Journal acknowledged Chromatic's critical role in transforming their infrastructure. Their lead technical contact stated that without Chromatic’s leadership, they would still be “bleeding money” on AWS and struggling with performance issues that previously seemed insurmountable.
Chromatic’s partnership with Farm Journal exemplifies our ability to solve complex technical problems while also empowering our clients to manage their own infrastructure more effectively. Chromatic helped Farm Journal reimagine how to run their technical and brand operations by leveraging Drupal's API first content management platform to create a content distribution systems, along with reducing infrastructure costs, improving performance, and freeing up internal resources.
