Customer: il manifesto
A large newspaper publisher consolidated multiple systems with ReachOut
Discover how il manifesto consolidated four different CMS and two business analytics apps into one flexible CMS while keeping the same data structure and exposing the new consolidated data to a RestAPI to build a composable architecture with multiple frontend applications.
Project URL: https://ilmanifesto.it
We started developing the iPad app of the Italian newspaper publisher il manifesto in 2012, a left-wing publisher that was facing several organizational issues and the declining revenue stream of print media. Apps were at the time a possible solution promising a new revenue model thanks to the App Store and the new user experience supporting a new subscription model for digital content.
11 years later our team had developed the iOS and Android apps for the main newspaper and the Le Monde Diplomatique digital editions, a custom user and subscription management system and a custom CMS based on WordPress, a paywall with custom flexible functionality and integrated multiple systems and payment processors.
It became clear in 2021 that most new ideas and product features saw the need of collecting data from several sources, integrating systems and informing product decisions with behavior data that was hardly available and visible to the team. The WordPress front-end was still running in PHP and tied to the WordPress back-end.
We made a long-term plan with il manifesto, and fast forward to today, ReachOut is the new integrated marketing and content automation platform that fuels more than 12M personalized page views connecting emails with web analytics and business intelligence.
Consolidating multiple data sources into one headless CMS
ReachOut includes a headless CMS that automatically exposes all collections to a RestAPI and GraphQL and is backed by a scalable PostgreSQL database. The CMS doesn't impose a specific data schema, allowing the easy import of existing data sources retaining the existing schema for compatibility. With granular access permissions and multiple API access points, the ReachOut CMS is ideal to build multiple web sites, landing pages, email campaigns using one integrated solution.
il manifesto needed to consolidate 4 large content collections – using different schema – and containing more than 700,000 pieces of content. The goal has been set to consolidate all content into one destination data schema based on schema.org's NewsArticle object and other best practices.
They also needed to consolidate user data from the user and subscription management system to connect the Metabase queries and dashboards and populate real-time reports from a consolidated data schema and data source.
The image asset library contains more than 1,2M files with custom meta-data.
ReachOut has been set up with all the destination data collections, classifications, fields and data types required. Our team built custom batch importers mapping the origin data to the destination fields and using the CMS RestAPI, all the content imported in batch and kept in sync with the origins that are still in use.