[editor's note: the statistics in the 2nd paragraph were modified from the original post based on updated numbers from Field & Stream]
A three-year journey comprising an ownership change and transitions to two content management systems has a happy ending for Field & Stream magazine: Record visitor growth.
At a time when other magazine sites are struggling to hold readers, Field & Stream has been steadily building its audience for the past seven months. December page views grew 128% from the prior year period, and January’s projected numbers look even brighter: a 162% increase in traffic from January 2009.
A big reason for the traffic surge: the switch to a new Drupal content management system (CMS). Re-launching the sites on the open-source CMS platform in January 2009 was the culmination of a rocky journey that began two years earlier when Time Inc. sold the titles (along with 16 other publications) to Bonnier. The publications had a short window to move off of Time’s Vignette platform, so the online team cobbled together a proprietary, Java-based CMS as an interim fix.
“Everyone understood that the Java CMS was a temporary solution,” says Nate Matthews, Field & Stream’s online editor. “Its limitations were pretty significant. There was not a lot of bolt-on functionality, which means we couldn’t adapt it very well. The most important aspect of any CMS is its ability to change and adapt, because as soon as you build a site, it’s outdated.”
The online team set its sights on Drupal. “We were looking for an open-source platform that had a lot of developers working on it,” says Matthews. “We liked the idea of being able to access lots of different ideas from an open-source community.” In addition, Popular Science – a sister publication also acquired by Bonnier from Time – had already had success migrating to Drupal.
More publishing brands are moving to Drupal and other open-source platforms, opting for the flexibility and lower implementation costs of an environment that can benefit from the collective wisdom of the development community. Publications such as The Economist, Fast Company and the New York Observer, have switched to Drupal. [Disclosure: eMediaVitals also uses Drupal.]
“Drupal is a perfect fit for publishing,” says Moshe Weitzman, a longtime Drupal developer and co-founder of Cyrve, which specializes in Drupal data-migration services. “It has a notion of content that’s really rich. It has a rich taxonomy system. It’s very good at letting you model your data. And it tries not to put too many roadblocks in front of you.”
The pain of data migration
The biggest roadblock of any CMS upgrade is migrating content and other assets to the new platform. “Publishers can get very nervous about a platform change,” says Weitzman. “They worry that their data won’t get moved properly, that it will be scrambled or lost, or that they’ll lose all the functionality they’ve developed over the years.”
There’s no avoiding the fact that data migration is a painstaking process that often requires re-tagging of all legacy assets. Field & Stream’s editors were well aware of the challenges, having already moved their data once from Vignette to the interim Java CMS.
“All of our magazine archives needed to be tagged,” says Matthews. “We used the entire magazine staff to help, because they were the category experts.”
All other online assets had to be moved as well – thousands of articles, photographs, user comments, and six blogs that were being integrated from the TypePad blogging platform.
“It was a big migration,” says Matthews. “We redesigned everything on the site from the ground up. We tried to make sure no links got broken and we didn’t lose a lot of our search juice.”
Record-setting growth
When dealing with such a large repository of content, it’s just about impossible to catch every broken link. There were plenty of bugs to fix after the redesigned sites launched last January. It was a good six months before the sites started experiencing a noticeable jump in traffic. Since last July, that growth has been on a record-setting monthly trajectory. Matthews says Field & Stream is now averaging about 550,000 unique visitors a month, and Outdoor Life has about 300,000 monthly uniques.
The integration of community tools with editorial content, enabled by the Drupal CMS, has been a big factor in drawing and engaging more visitors, says Matthews.
“We’ve been able to tap into our strong community of hunters and fishermen to provide a depth of detail on the site that our edit team didn’t have the resources to do on their own,” he says. Case in point: a new Answers module, in which visitors can ask or answer questions from other members, has seen more than 10,000 questions posted along with 95,000 answers.
Next steps? In the short term, Matthews says, the Web team will continue to work on fixing bugs and adding features that didn’t make it into the initial launch. The team is also looking to improve the site’s integration with Facebook, add more video, and experiment with maps and other ways to make content more relevant at a local level.
Oh, and there’s yet another migration on the horizon: a move from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 that’s planned for the summer.
“Now that we’re on Drupal,” says Matthews, “the next migration will be much easier.”
Comments
Magazine Site Migration and Links
One thing I have not been able to solve when migrating from another CMS to Drupal is the links. On the old system you might have thousands of articles and their URl might be something like http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&It...
When you migrate to a new CMS like Drupal, you may have your URl look like this: http://www.example.com/article/fishing-is-fun
Now when someone googles Fishing is fun, they might get a page does not exist error or we can redirect them to another page. I'm not alone here am I? How do others handle this?
Use 301 redirects
Great question! One of the most overlooked elements of a redesign is maintaining legacy link structure. You want to do this for a number of reasons:
The way to get around this is to use 301 redirects. What the heck is that, you may ask? Basically, it's a way to let a search engine know to take your previous URL's links, SEO placement, etc. and apply it to the new URL. It says that the document is the same, but it's url has moved permanently. There are a number of different ways to accomplish this technically, and I'm not going to geek out too much here. However, if your site runs on the Apache Web server, you can take a look at the URL rewriting tutorial. I'm less familiar with how to handle this in other environments (Microsoft, IBM WebSphere, etc.). However, it is possible.