With 28 different brands under its umbrella, Farm Journal is the leading name in business information across American agriculture. However, with publications covering everything from used farm equipment to beef, pork, and produce, not to mention its own talk radio station, Farm Journal needed a reliable and easy-to-navigate content management system to distribute syndicated features across its many properties.
Like any field left untended, Farm Journal’s original Node.js-based content distribution platform was unorganized, outdated, and ineffective. The brand’s many digital properties were developed individually, without sharing configurations and styling, raising difficulties and substantial overhead in the maintenance and development of new features across the network. This tangle created a series of difficult-to-manage and tough-to-navigate user experiences, missed ad revenue opportunities, and an ongoing headache for Farm Journal’s internal editorial and distribution teams.
Starting with a thorough diagnostic review of Farm Journal’s existing ecosystem, we identified and remediated the points of failure in their decoupled architecture. We then joined their internal stakeholders to design a cohesive brand identity and develop a scalable distribution system that accounted for the varying needs of their many departments. With the new platform in place, we then guided Farm Journal through the migration, deploying many new properties in the process.
A new, 100-percent Drupal platform with a content management system that grants Farm Journal editors and admins complete visibility into 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 single codebase provides Farm Journal developers with minimal overhead and plenty to scale in the future.
