PostCMS is a next-generation content management system, engineered by ELITEX for one of the biggest Italian media corporations – Il Sole 24 Ore. While able to work with any kind of content, it was designed to be very fast and focused on search engines.

The challenge

While there are many content management systems (CMS) on the market, none of them met the needs of our customer perfectly. Working in the newsroom and knowing the daily challenges of journalists and editors, the author of the project’s idea decided to build something completely different.

The customer needed to develop a CMS based on six principles:

1. Speed The product has to work seamlessly on modern devices, allowing editors and contributors to produce content without delays and distractions.

2. Simple UX Light, easy to navigate, showing options only when they are needed, not cluttering the UI/UX unnecessarily.

3. Think SEO first Search engine optimisation is a very important factor for websites. The CMS must present all required information to search engines so that pages can rank higher.

4. An efficient collaboration tool They needed a strong, surefire solution for multiple people working on the same content remotely.

5. Desk functionality For example, the ability to set statuses for the content and advanced permissions.

6. A perfect match for the existing software complex The new system should work well and be easily integrated with existing software – Salsify frontend and ImageX media library.

The solution

From the ELITEX side, an R&D team of senior front-end and back-end JavaScript developers worked on this project, who provided complete technical consultancy to the client. We also provided QA engineers to make sure the app worked as smoothly as possible.

We used:

• Back-end - NodeJS and Sails.js

• Front-end - AngularJS

• Database - MongoDB

• Infrastructure - AWS

As the project required a flexible approach, the team decided to work based on a scrum methodology, having two-week-long sprints. New developments were continuously deploying to the cloud, so the result could be seen immediately.

The result

After months of active work, the prototype was ready. The ELITEX team has engineered a new CMS with a number of advanced features, including:

• Ability to work with any type of content- from articles to bank accounts. We built an architecture that allows adding new types of content right in the admin UI.

• Extended content management and collaboration tools to allow multiple editors to work on the same content effectively.

• Strong integration with schema.org to maximise the proper understanding of the content by search engines.

• Clean and fast UI to focus on the content, not on the UI itself.

• User and role management to control access to the features of the system.

• Own templating system to define how the content is displayed.

The CMS architecture allows it to run on Amazon server, makes the system scalable, fully customised, and flexible to add new features. That’s why, in addition to the direct value that it brings, PostCMS also helps to save budget on the infrastructure and its maintenance.