One news network for every school and office

The problem

Each school and office published news its own way — separate templates, hand-built listing pages, no feeds. Stories couldn't be shared across units without copy-and-paste, site search missed most of them, and communicators rebuilt every story again by hand for each social channel.

What I did

Built a shared news content model and templates across a Cascade CMS multisite, which publishes dynamic content out as fast static files. On top of it: auto-generated RSS feeds per unit, category and tag; an export that pushes each published article's structured data to the university's search indexing provider; and social post export and import, so a story's summary and image go out to social channels ready to post, and approved social posts can be pulled back into unit sites. PHP handles the API calls to the search indexing provider and social platforms at publish time; JavaScript renders feeds and shared stories on unit sites.

Outcome

Units publish a story once and it reaches their site, other units’ feeds, site search and social without re-entry. Static output keeps pages fast and secure, and new units join by configuration instead of a custom build. Stories can also be repurposed and reused across the network, and a story that changes over time is updated in one place.

Stack

Detail