Digital Pulp Blog

Traditional Content Management Systems assume that the content you are managing lives within the CMS. What if the content that makes up your website is being syndicated from many disparate sources (RSS, custom databases, etc.) as well as arriving via manual content entry? Well, as long as they were used in different ways, it’s not a big deal. But what if every item–every article on the site–was to be managed and displayed the same way, no matter what the source? Those and other challenging questions were what we faced when we embarked on building the new Communications of the ACM website.

The DP team conceived and implemented a custom-built Content Aggregation Engine (CAE) to pull in, or ingest, content from all of the previously mentioned disparate sources and unify it into a single data model for publishing on the site. The hours dedicated to coding were significantly less than the time spent defining the business rules, testing the application and making the product rock solid. The project required everything from broad strategic thinking to very detailed execution. 

It’s a challenge to give a recognized industry leader the ability to supercharge their flagship publication. The Content Aggregation Engine was our way of providing even more value to their prestigous membership.