The business problem
A publishing platform needs to serve editors as well as visitors. Minto's work involved moving beyond a legacy system while supporting content shared across the organisation and content specific to regional and community websites.
The scope reached beyond page presentation: application structure, editorial tools, external data, media handling and release processes all formed part of the wider work.
My involvement and the project phases
I supported the legacy system through 2017. The subsequent upgrade had two steps: a backend system update in 2018, followed by the frontend upgrade in 2022.
That sequence is important to the story. It was a phased modernisation, with the existing system and later changes considered separately.
The wider work
The project also developed a three-level publishing model for national, regional and community content. The team's work included a page builder, AI-assisted template reuse, extensible page-building capabilities, external data import and transformation, and media management.
Infrastructure and delivery planning accompanied application development. Automated visual regression checks and backend end-to-end tests were introduced to support release decisions.
What the project demonstrates
The result was a modernised multi-site publishing application with broader editorial capabilities and automated verification in the delivery process. It illustrates the relationship between a content model, the tools used to manage it and the process used to release changes.
Discuss a modernisation project
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