Our Work

Services Provided

After many years running their website with the ExpressionEngine content management system, Noozhawk was enticed to migrate to WordPress by the creators of Newspack, an easy-to-use WordPress platform for publishers. Although ExpressionEngine had served Noozhawk well, being part of a group of publishers on the same platform promised to give Noozhawk more resources, expertise, and technical support than they could achieve on their own.

But migrations between content management systems can be really hard, and that’s especially true when moving from a totally customized content management system you’ve been using for more than 10 years to a “one-size-fits-all” CMS that, while powerful, operates in some fundamentally different ways. Noozhawk wasn’t just looking at migrating their content, they were facing changes to every part of their editorial production process and a major learning curve. After some months of trying to coordinate the migration while still maintaining their existing website, Noozhawk turned to Hop Studios to manage the project. We were keen to continue our decade-long relationship with Noozhawk, and to assist them in taking advantage of this exciting opportunity.

We started by building a project timeline, and a thorough analysis of the current website to identify what should be migrated and what could be retired. It was quite a list! Noozhawk began publishing in 2007 and, during 14 years(!) of publishing before the migration, had amassed more than 100,000 pieces of content to migrate. The list was daunting:

• Articles
• User content submission forms with admin and user email notifications
• Author and member accounts
• Section fronts, many customized to the subject material
• Special Reports
• Bylines
• Kickers
• Ads and sponsors, including sponsored content sections
• Donation system
• Newsletter templates and subscription forms
• Place, event, marketplace, and general listing sections, each with specialized designs and presentations
• Informational and organizational content pages, like contact, about, team, privacy policy, etc.
• Event Calendar

Hop Studios worked with Newspack to build custom export scripts to flow the layout and fields of each content section into the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) format used for importing. This required extensive back-and-forth testing and revision with Newspack, whose assistance in figuring out the details was crucial. Migrating content from slideshows and galleries into their respective WordPress blocks was quite a challenge just in itself!

As part of our migration plan, we also identified areas of special complication — features that existed in ExpressionEngine but not in WordPress, and vice versa. Even bylines weren’t a simple export/import process — they’d been handled fundamentally differently in ExpressionEngine and due to tiny variations, required an immense amount of cleanup to fit the WordPress model. There were other key differences as well — the old site didn’t use featured images, for instance, but that’s a core WordPress feature. Noozhawk had also grown accustomed to being able to customize sections visually, utilizing different layouts and styles in, say, Local News vs. Sports.

Even commonly used features and functionality needed “translation” due to the change in the content management system: kickers, section headers, tags, videos, primary categories, article updated labelling, related stories, global variables and other commonly used code elements, maps, third-party scripts, URL redirects, and custom functionality coded in JavaScript and PHP. Oh, and of course the new site needed to be branded with the Noozhawk look and feel.

All of the migration work had to be planned around the production schedule and high traffic times on the site — you can’t download hundreds of thousands of image files off a server or run a script that generates thousands of downloadable text files without a performance ding!

It took nearly a year of coordination, testing, QA, refinement, and training — Hop Studios also wrote a full set of documentation for Noozhawk on using the new site to assist their team in understanding how to accomplish standard editorial tasks in a new environment — before the new site was ready to go, but we got there, and in December 2022 there was much rejoicing!

The new site is serving Noozhawk well, as is their experience connecting with and learning from other publishers in the Newspack family. Hop Studios continues to assist Noozhawk with strategic advice, particularly significant layout changes, general technical troubleshooting like email management, ad management, design and layout changes to newsletters, coordination with Newspack, spinning up new sections and functionality, training, and making the best use of the WordPress system.

We’re so appreciative of the opportunity to make such a substantial contribution to our long-time friends at Noozhawk, an organization whose values, goals, and people mesh so well with ours at Hop Studios. Partnering in such a substantial way with a client we believe in makes our work meaningful.

Bring on the next challenge, Noozhawk!