The Great Consolidation: Entertainment Weekly Migration Case Study

EW.com, the digital site for Entertainment Weekly and a top entertainment news site, migrated in January 2015 from Vignette 6 CMS and 10 different WordPress blogs to a single unified platform built on Drupal 7. Join both Four Kitchens and Time Inc. engineers on the project as we discuss the process, starting with discovery all the way through launch preparation.

Challenges included:

• Migrating close to 219k posts, 292k images, and 475k terms into Drupal without spilling a drop
• Separating overloaded freeform tags into specific vocabularies and creative works
• Maintaining a high performance backend and frontend with multiple distributed caching layers
• Coordinating distributed teams across multiple continents
• Enforcing best practices, code quality and standards
• High speed integrations with an existing and complex advertising system
• Porting legacy, non-standard code and maintaining functional parity

We’ll also discuss:

• Development environments using unified Virtual Machines
• Custom Drupal distributions used across multiple in-house groups for different projects
• Promoting open-source culture in a commercial environment

This is a follow-up to the 2014 DrupalCon Session Time Inc's Big Move to Drupal, and was presented at SANDcamp 2015.