WWE & Lullabot Tag Team A Drupal Relaunch

We're proud to announce that World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE) is now running on Drupal! For the past year, WWE and Lullabot have worked closely to design and build a flexible, scalable platform for the company's site and its fans. With 200 million page views and more than six million unique visitors each month, WWE.com's peak traffic is higher than ABC.com, CBS.com, NBC.com, NASCAR.com, PerezHilton.com, NHL.com, and UFC.com -- combined!















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Lullabot's work on the site was led by Jeff Eaton, project managed by Rachel Scott, and executed by developers David Burns, Matt Kleve, and Blake Hall. Beginning in early 2010, the team worked with WWE to assess the state of their existing platform, their future plans, and the critically important production needs of the WWE in-house content team. Over the following month, a discovery audit was created that served as the blueprint for the migration project to follow.

WWE.com's previous incarnation was built on a closed-source CMS that served the company well for several years, but posed problems when more flexibility was needed. As the complexity of the site grew, content editors were forced to spend their time managing the details of each page's layout, rather than producing new material for eager fans. The new Drupal-powered design emphasizes channels of content related to WWE Superstars and their fans, upcoming events, and special editorial features like a leaderboard of rising stars. Rich metadata connects articles to each other without the need for explicit editorial management, while Drupal's Panels and Views modules handle the display of related information.

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One of the most important parts of the new WWE.com platform is invisible to visitors: heavily customized production tools for the site's content editors. Along with Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science, Blake Hall worked closely with the WWE.com team to dissect their legacy CMS's user interface, map the critical aspects of their nightly production process, and discover key pain points for their daily work.

The result is a highly optimized editorial process that bears little resemblance to Drupal's default interface and workflow. While tools like CCK and Views handle the underlying data, custom administrative screens allow the WWE team to manage the complex connections between "anchor" content like television shows and their related articles, photos, events, and more. Node editing screens have been rearranged and streamlined to focus on the common tasks that team members perform rather than the underlying data they're creating; and a suite of bulk management tools built with Views and Views Bulk Operations allows the team to quickly slice and dice the site's huge library of content.

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With more than ten million existing pieces of legacy content dating back to the 1980s, and up-to-the-minute coverage of current WWE events, the migration work began even before development had officially started. A continuous migration process, managed by the WWE.com development team, allowed the site's front-end design, back-end editorial tools, and historical content archive to be built in parallel.

On the presentation front, Matt Kleve spearheaded the recreation of legacy Flash-based assets like promotional rotators and photo galleries. The new WWE.com uses standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with tools like jQuery to deliver more flexible versions of these features. Visitors can access more of the site's rich media content on mobile browsers and Apple's iPad, and the content is much easier to adapt to future design changes.

We're really proud of the work we did to help the WWE site run smoother for its fans and its staff -- and excited to see where their team takes it!

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