MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review is a media publication offering print and digital subscriptions to their content. MIT-TR was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899. You know what this means, right? They had decades and decades of content that needed to be migrated over to a new platform they hired Alley Interactive to do for them. MIT's previous website was built on top of Drupal, their own interal home backed CMS they used on top Drupal, and variety of other 3rd party services used to manage subscriptions, payment processing, paywalls, etc. They had a multiple goals they wanted to accomplish during this complete rebuild of their software. First was to get onto a more modern and flexible tech stack that also reduced the amount moving parts that it took to operate their machine of a website. Second was that they had redesigned the UI of many components through out their website requiring a rebuild. And third was that they were going through some changes in partnerships with 3rd party integrations.

It was a massive undertaking with lots of moving parts, a big data migration, a complete rebuild of their front end, and some elements of the app, such as "The Feed" that required complex logic to acheive the cadence they desired. Alley Interactive is an elite digital agency that specializes in such projects that require this type of heavy lifting and complex migrations. I was blessed to be on the talented team at Alley that was chosen to take on this beast of a project. It was a great learning experience and an opportunity to work with some technology that I hadn't yet worked with.

I think the beginning of this project was the most challenging in that we had to figure out all the moving parts, capture requirements and specs of their current internal CMS, figure out how we were going to migrates 1000s of users from Drupal, manage subscriptions, migrate decades of content into Wordpress and components into Gutenberg, how we were going to build the paywall, and the list goes on. Luckily we have a very talented group of developers on our team at Alley Interactive and through team work, iteration, and putting all our heads together... we were able to build something great for our client.

Alley Interactive has built a framework call Irving for building headless websites on top of Wordpress.

Irving Core is a React based, isomorphically rendered, headless CMS frontend application. Irving allows quick and easy development of headless/decoupled websites.

Also from Irving's docs, "Irving takes a JSON string of components and hydrates React components. The frontend application makes a request to the API passing along the route details, which keeps the business logic in the backend/CMS layer. This allows for lightweight rendering and output without sacrificing any SPA functionality or foregoing and of React's advantages." It was interesting working with Irving because we structured all our data the way we wanted it on the backend in Wordpress and fed the data to the front end app to its counter part React components. The result of building MIT's website as a headless site with Irving produced great results in terms of performance. Their site is incredibly fast :)

We built a separate Node/Express app to take of migrating and managing users and subscriptions from a 3rd party service to the new one. We used one of Alley's internal tools for assisting in data migration from Drupal over to Wordpress. We chose Automattic's VIP platform for their hosting solution.

All in all this project turned out to be very challenging but also very fun. At the end of the project our team was happy with what we have built for MIT and the client was happy as well with their new platform for their site and managing their content.