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Introduction & About the Client 

Stuff Limited, New Zealand’s leading media company, operates a range of news platforms, including its flagship site, Stuff. With over 380 journalists covering communities nationwide, Stuff combines local depth with comprehensive national and global reporting across its numerous newspaper and magazine titles. 

Despite their impressive reach and journalistic excellence, Stuff was dealing with increasing issues with their technology infrastructure. The legacy CMS, integral to their publishing operations, had become increasingly costly to maintain and prone to frequent change failures. To fix this, Stuff partnered with Material seeking a modernized platform that would be resilient, cost-effective and capable of streamlining their operations while boosting efficiency. 

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)

Stuff Limited wanted to 

  • Improve system reliability and business continuity by replacing their legacy platform, which was prone to frequent failures. 

  • Streamline content management across multiple news platforms, ensuring scalability, reliability and a seamless experience. 

  • Enhance the overall user experience for both editorial teams and content consumers by building a performant, cross-channel digital platform.

Our Solution 

In this project, Stuff Limited aimed to modernize their aging CMS platform, which was costly to maintain and prone to frequent failures. Their objective was to enhance system performance, reduce operational costs and streamline content management across their diverse range of news platforms. To achieve this, we implemented the following solutions.: 

  • We modernized the CMS by utilizing Drupal as a content service, adding an abstraction layer for future flexibility without requiring heavy engineering. 

  • We integrated Drupal/Symfony events with microservices through a message broker and implemented the CQRS pattern to separate data actions from queries, boosting performance. 

  • We leveraged document DB-based materialized views to ensure high-read throughput and low latency for faster data access. 

  • We implemented a robust caching strategy using CDN, Varnish and Kong. This handled up to 200 million requests daily with a 98% cache offload and dynamic cache tags, keeping responses fast. 

  • We built the underlying application platform on Kubernetes and AWS Cloud, leveraging CNCF products for scalability and reliability. 

Outcome 

Key project outcomes include 

  • Achieved a 30% reduction in cloud and operational costs. 

  • Built a scalable, API-first Drupal multi-tenant system capable of handling up to 200 million requests per day. 

  • Enabled omnichannel experiences for digital publications across web and mobile platforms. 

  • Reduced CMS-related engineering efforts through the implementation of core APIs. 

  • Facilitated faster adaptation to business needs by adopting an API-first approach. 

Why Drupal was chosen

Stuff's legacy system struggled to meet the growing customer base and traffic demands. To achieve the scale at which the CMS had to operate, Drupal emerged as the ideal CMS, offering the following key benefits. 

  • Scalable, Flexible Architecture and Easy Integration: Drupal's API-first, multi-tenant architecture allows for seamless scalability and easy integration with other platforms. This made it the perfect choice for a media organization with high traffic demands. 

  • Optimized Performance: Drupal's ability to integrate with microservices and implement the CQRS pattern help enhance system performance. 

  • Cost Reduction: As an open-source platform, Drupal helps lower operational costs, including cloud and maintenance fees, while offering flexibility without vendor lock-in. 

  • Enhanced User and Editorial Experience: Drupal’s powerful content management capabilities, combined with customizable workflows and templates, streamlines editorial processes and enriches user engagement for both web and mobile. 

By leveraging Drupal’s strengths, Stuff was able to modernize its platform, ensuring a future-proof solution that met both business and technical requirements.