Earlier this year, Time Inc. started the process to migrate People.com from three separate content management systems into one consolidated site, hosted by WordPress.com VIP. A team at Alley lead by Partner and Chief Strategy Officer Brad Campeau-Laurion and Director of WordPress Platform Services Tom Harrigan has directed that effort since March.
In June, the Home and Food sections of People.com launched, and were joined by the Style and Pets sections in August. The remainder of the site will be fully migrated this fall, followed by People en Español and Entertainment Weekly.
At the Big WP Meetup in New York City last month, Brad presented the results of this process with Nicholas Butterworth, the Head of Product, Digital Entertainment for Time Inc. The slides below show how our team created a multi-phase approach for this complex process and used our internal migration toolkit to rapidly and seamlessly move content to the new site. It also highlights our open source Ad Layers plugin that allows for extreme flexibility in managing complex ad maps within WordPress.