Four Kitchens

Entertainment Weekly

The great consolidation

The client

The source for instant entertainment news to 13.7 million users across desktop, tablet, and mobile, Entertainment Weekly is a major player in the entertainment category group at Time Inc.

The problem

The EW.com team was in a rut — stuck managing content across 10 different WordPress VIP blogs and a large legacy Vignette site. They needed to consolidate their digital content and implement a rapid-publishing solution to minimize time between publishing and going live.

The solutions

EW.com approached Four Kitchens to help migrate content and integrate editorial workflow onto a single, Drupal-based solution. High-level strategy on features for the new site, a partner to help the internal team leverage the Drupal platform and make it their own, a codebase that could be shared across titles, and migration of more than 20 years of content would all need to be considered for the creation of a platform that EW.com could continue to grow for years to come.

Rendering advertisements

Four Kitchens’ technology greatly increased the performance at the frontend of the site without compromising advertising needs. The new method for advertisement rendering on EW.com is now recognized as the industry-standard for online ads. New techniques render the ads on the site as quickly as possible, even finding and correcting issues with third-party advertising code on the site.

Case Study: EW.com: Advertisement Loading
Advertisements load on EW.com

Developing a migration and transition plan

The Four Kitchens team reduced the cumbersome migration process, pared down to a manageable operational process, then transferred ownership to the internal EW.com team to take over. Four Kitchens gave the EW.com team the knowledge to fully prepare the team for launch and handle support thereafter.

Promoting “open culture” at Time Inc.

Four Kitchens shared their codebase with other brands within Time Inc., providing code, instructions, and lessons learned in order to save time and avoid wasted effort. Four Kitchens established a process that greatly reduced the onboarding time for Time Inc. team members with documentation and process optimization. Further, Four Kitchens helped EW.com pave the way for other Time Inc. publications in their move to an “innersource” Drupal ecosystem across all Time Inc. brands.

EW.com

Four Kitchens’ knowledge and expertise not only made a challenging project successful, but made our team feel that our site and brand were in good hands every step of the way.

—Jessica Northrop, Sr. Project Manager

The details

We launched the new EW.com in 2015.

Services provided

  • Migration from WordPress and Vignette to Drupal 7
  • Information architecture
  • Consolidation of large (10,000+) digital library of taxonomy terms
  • Frontend performance engineering
  • Optimized platform for implementing ad content
  • implemented high-performance web analytics

Technologies used

  • Drupal 7
  • Sass
  • Compass
  • Gulp
  • New Relic