Association of Computing Machinery: Technology Does The Heavy Lifting

"Digital Pulp gave us a clean, fresh look, powerful search and browse functionality, and enabled us to better serve our existing readers in the computing and IT community. We are now able to offer our members a true online magazine experience with interactivity and user generated content to complement our industry leading print publication."

– Scott Delman, Group Publisher, ACM Media

Visit: cacm.acm.org

Industry: Publishing, Nonprofit, Science & Education

Services: Custom Solutions, Web Design & Development

Challenge: ACM, a global society of advanced computing and IT professionals, wanted to enhance its Communications of the ACM (CACM) online magazine. They wanted to provide access to an extensive archive of magazine and Digital Library articles; add user-generated content capabilities; and serve up fresh content daily from many different online sources of technical news and opinion. All of this content had to be managed by a single Web editor.

Solution: ACM and Digital Pulp selected Radiant, an open-source CMS built in Ruby on Rails, as the technology platform for the new CACM site.

DP built a custom Content Aggregation Engine that automatically consumes and formats articles from a variety of internal and external sources. Once in the system, the articles are presented to the web editor in a unified interface for effortless reviewing, editing, and publishing.

The new CACM site gives members access to blogs, news, industry-oriented articles, research and opinion articles, e-newsletters and topic alerts, and RSS feeds. Over 50 years of Communications of the ACM magazine articles are all browsable by subject and formatted for optimal viewing. To accomplish this, DP integrated the new CMS with ACM’s digital repository of full-text articles (the ACM Digital Library), and also integrated its authentication and access control systems so that the content is now accessible and viewable directly through the CACM site.

In addition, DP added user-generated content tools to the site, allowing members to comment on articles and blog posts, and share pages with popular social networks.

Result: In its first 60 days, the site achieved a global reach. Traffic more than doubled, climbing to over 1,400 visits/day on average, with nearly 98,000 unique visitors from over 190 countries who speak 113 different languages. 72% of visitors arrive from over 1,700 social media and other sites.