Sector(s)

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

MediaElement JS D8 port
Coral Talk Commenting

Media Matters for America is a progressive research and information center that monitors, analyzes and corrects conservative misinformation in the media. Founded in 2004, Media Matters systematically monitors a cross section of print, broadcast, television, radio and internet media outlets for unreliable, inaccurate or non-credible conservative news or commentary. 

We worked with Media Matters for America to completely redesign their flagship website, a platform that delivers in-depth reporting and analysis with articles, long-form narratives, and of course, rich content media. With hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, over a petabyte of media files, and a wide variety of target audiences, the website delivers Media Matters’ stories in a visually compelling, user-friendly experience that is responsive and adaptive on all platforms.
 

About the project

Key Challenges:

  • Define Media Matters’ website goals and target audiences to establish a user-focused foundation for the project.
  • Design a compelling experience that is responsive and adaptive for all modern devices.
  • Simplify and streamline the experience for both end users and authors. 
  • Migrate and restructure hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and media from Drupal 7. 

Solutions:

  • We ran a series of on-site workshops and discussions to clearly understand, define and document Media Matters’ goals and audiences.
  • We designed a dynamic digital experience that reflects Media Matters’ unique content with bold colors, striking design, and ample white space.
  • We built tools for granular, site-wide control of how articles are displayed. Editors can choose alternate titles, images, and other fields for specific contexts and pages throughout the website, as well as on social media channels. Further, editing options are tailored to specific user roles and permissions, streamlining the experience for authors.
  • We provided technical architecture and development support for Media Matters’ internal team to migrate hundreds of thousands of distinct pieces of content. 
     

Why Drupal was chosen

Media Matters wanted to continue leveraging their investment and understanding of Drupal systems by upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 for the website redesign. Drupal 8’s powerful authoring features, capabilities for large publishing teams and advanced cache system for lightning fast-page loads made it the ideal choice for MMFA.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Contributed Modules

MediaElement brings the MediaElement.js html5 player plugin to Drupal. 

Paragraphs provides authors with editorial control and writing for articles and design control on the home page and certain landing pages.

Flyssystem 2S integrated content between Drupal and Amazon s3 CDN.

Core Modules

In addition to key contributed modules, the new build leverages a broad spectrum of core Drupal 8 functionality. Specifically, core Media and Content Moderation are used heavily throughout the website. 

Drupal 8 Core Media powers all media content as well as manages and organizes the entire media library for Media Matters. 

Content Moderation allows Media Matters publishers to review and edit all content before it is published.