CMS

Front page (re)builder

CMS

In early December 2012, I started working on redesigning the current Content Management System (CMS) comprising the following tools:

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The existing 3-step system of article creation was not supporting the emerging model for real-time publishing; in researching related solutions, my team was inspired by Storify’s way of integrating media discovery with story creation, so we built our article creation tool to cater to the predominant methods that Bleacher Report’s writers used, while leading them towards the envisioned model of seamlessly searching, discovering and dropping real-time media into their articles in future iterations.

The first build was rolled out to a small group of writers in early-April 2013. Initial feedback showed more useful results for image and video discovery, which led to higher-quality media being chosen for articles.

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Due to the changes made in the article creation UI, the Editor Feedback module had to be redesigned so that writers could still view, access and reply to editors when needed. This was particularly tricky in the Create Slideshow tool because of additional elements such as the Slides Manager panel.

My solution was a collapsible drawer that expanded from the bottom of the screen, with obvious visual indicators when an editor had left feedback.

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A number of tools are currently at the initial concepts stage. One of these is the Writer Dashboard, which is the landing page for writers to begin creating and managing articles, amongst other functions. Currently, writers have no consolidated location to see which of their articles have been edited, and managing articles is a tedious task.