Dynamic Plone Site with Rich Content

Discover Magazine is best known in its print form as a science magazine written for a general audience. Discover's web presence, http://discovermagazine.com, was powered by the Plone content management system for a long time.

The Discover website was developed by Abstract Edge and is maintained by Six Feet Up. Discover needed a way to manage rich multimedia content, social networking, and their widely acclaimed written materials in one dynamic website.

The Discover home page features Latest News and Most Popular lists. The Latest News list is generated from Discover's RSS feed. The Most Popular list gathers information from a mysql database and determines which piece of content has been most accessed during the last 24 hours. The home page also features a Flash-based content player that links to featured articles throughout the site.

Discover features a Plone integration with wordpress-mu for blog management. The latest blog posts appear on the Discover home page. Bad Astronomy is one of the site's most popular blogs. Six Feet Up implemented the Plone + wordpress-mu integration, which resulted in a seamless look and feel for the Discover brand.

Many sub-pages of Discover have polls where users can participate and then track real time voting results. All pieces of content are fully Web 2.0 compliant with buttons for sharing content via reddit, facebook, fark, stumble upon, Digg, and more. Site traffic has increased substantially since social networking tools were added.

Since using Plone, Discover has been able to publish a magazine issue in much less time than with their previous platform. Discover can also make any content limited to only subscribers. Plone also allows Discover to integrate streaming video, podcasts, photo galleries, and other types of multi-media content, which allow visitors a rich content experience.

Administrators of the Discover website have the ability to control ads, home page and landing page content. Editors for the site have the option to upload an InDesign file, which will automatically import content for an entire issue of the magazine.