Major League Soccer's Dynamic Editorial Experience
Kaia McIntyre
Kaia McIntyre: Digital Experience Engineer
Partnered with Major League Soccer (MLS) to enhance their editorial workflows by prototyping and implementing a dynamic component library built on top of their newly migrated headless Drupal CMS. This solution streamlined content management across multiple team sites, allowing editors to efficiently manage and customize content while maintaining consistency across the platform.
Prototyped an editorial experience leveraging the flexibility of a headless Drupal CMS, enabling team-specific customization while preserving a cohesive design across MLS properties.
Developed a custom Drupal plugin that integrated seamlessly with the editorial component system, providing MLS editors with intuitive tools to create and manage content more efficiently.
Improved the editorial processes by delivering reusable components that could be quickly deployed, reducing overhead and improving content publication speed.
Worked closely with cross-functional teams to ensure the editorial tools met the technical needs of both editors and developers, optimizing for scalability and maintainability.
This experience deepened my ability to deliver tailored, scalable solutions that streamline complex workflows while enhancing user experience.
Customized, Flexible, Consistent Platform
Major League Soccer's digital platform unites a global community of fans through a multitude of websites and applications that represent the League and its 26 clubs. The platform's expansive architecture weaves a variety of services and functions to provide this community a panoply of information - from season schedules to player stats to game data, as well as expert insights and rich media.
The organization sought Phase2’s assistance to migrate each team’s site to a single Drupal 7 platform. Migrating 20 club sites onto a new platform while maintaining the legacy platform was no small task. MLS needed highly sophisticated customization options based on each team’s design, content priorities, and site maintainers’ capabilities. Each site had to have the same code base and capabilities, but offer full flexibility for each team’s site owners. At the same time, each legacy site had to be supported as the migration took place over several months.
Unique Team Brand Identity
Working with a blended group of Phase2 team members and MLS technical teams, we created a large Drupal platform that would establish consistency in the code base and data sources while still allowing each team to create a distinct identity. As a result, each team site’s design cohesively fits within MLS’s digital brand despite differences in colors, images, and styles.
Delighting the MLS fanbase was a priority throughout the project. Each team’s site maintainers can easily configure their team’s instance to best fit their technical capabilities. At the same time, we enhanced fans’ ability to enjoy their favorite sport from any device.
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