Bespoke Content Management System for this fortnightly magazine, including subscription and community features. www.catapultmagazine.com
When Culture Is Not Optional (CINO)—the publishers of Catapult Magazine—approached us they were running their fortnightly magazine from a coldfusion based content management system that was well past its prime. As we began discussing options for their future, including such fundamentals as clean URLs, RSS feeds, and the like, it became clear that a from-the-ground rebuild was the order of the day.
Fast-forward a few years, and through one transitional system, and the Catapult publishing platform is a carefully crafted Ruby on Rails-based Content Management System. While we considered other options, and existing tools such as drupal could have done the job, such was the volume of legacy data and the precise requirements that a bespoke system was less work to set up and provided a number of compelling options for the future. Ruby on Rails provided just the right balance of framework code and a wealth of pre-built plugins, without requiring us to work around the baggage that often comes with larger off-the-shelf systems.
Like the Generous project, Catapult is designed to support a number of sites running off one code base and we are working with CINO to identify other publishers who may benefit from the system we've built.