AL DÍA News

When embarking on their website re-design and re-development, AL DÍA and Eastern Standard set out with some very defined, lofty goals in mind:

Expand the reach of AL DÍA's content from Philadelphia to the national stage
Print publishers find themselves in the position of having to evolve or face extinction, and AL DÍA knew that a locally focused approach would not carry them into the future. As a result, their content creation approach shifted from a purely local focus to politics, opinion, and technology that affect the Latino community on a national scale. The updated site aesthetic and information design reinforces the scope of their brand, but we needed a CMS that would support AL DÍA's continued growth into the future. The enterprise-class features, availability of add-on modules, and wide adoption of Drupal made it a clear winner. And the results are in: a comparison of current pageviews vs. the same month last year (before the new site) shows an increase of more than double.

Provide fully translated content in both English and Spanish
The editorial team committed to translating content manually into both English and Spanish; the Drupal back-end allows them to add content in both languages. Visitors can toggle between English and Spanish on any article, thanks to Drupal's continuing commitment to internationalization. The i18n set of internationalization modules are used throughout the site to provide a true multilingual experience.

Since AL DÍA's history was primarily in providing Spanish-language content, there was much discussion surrounding how to provide ongoing content in both English and Spanish, and how to treat articles that didn't yet have translations. Ultimately, the AL DÍA team committed to manually translating their articles as they were written, an impressive but necessary undertaking for providing true multilingual content.

Another challenge was migrating almost 70,000 pieces of content from their old, Joomla-based website. However, some custom code and the Feeds module allowed us to port these items over, though we did have to account for differences in character encoding as they came out of the old database and into the new.

Capture mobile traffic from both North and South America
A forward-thinking, fully responsive mobile design, crafted with AngularJS as the front-end engine, provides an engaging and intuitive experience on any device. Drupal's flexible theme layer allowed us to craft a custom front-end to match our design, and apply the AngularJS tags where necessary to fill in the live content.

Empower the staff to manage content and media through an intuitive interface that integrated with their internal workflows
Drupal's powerful content management tools allow the editorial team to generate and publish content with no web developer intervention. Even just the out-of-the-box user account and permissions systems were enough to get a solid editorial workflow in place, though we always keep Workbench in our back pocket if things need to get even more detailed. With separate roles for bloggers, contributors, editors, and publishers, the content teams can provide limited access to specific content types where necessary, but editors and publishers retain the ability to edit, delete, publish, and create revisions of any of the articles on the site.

Additionally, the SimpleAds module allows the AL DiA team to manage their ads as if they were content, assigning them to various sections of the site by applying taxonomy terms to the ads. For example, an ad can be applied to just the "technology" section or just the "opinion" section, as dictated by the ad packages and needs of the advertisers.