Published on by Devin Reams
Yesterday, Crowd Favorite and Beatport launched Beatport News on WordPress. Previously, beatportal.com existed as the online community and resource for electronic and dance news for DJs, producers, and fans alike.
From Beatport's CEO, Matt Adell:
The result is that what once was a bit of a side-project is now getting all the love and attention that the community and our readers deserve.
Crowd Favorite leveraged their existing tools and techniques to export the ExpressionEngine post items (and other metadata, such as featured images) into a WXR (WordPress XML) file ready for immediate import using existing WordPress tools. Ultimately, thousands of posts and images spanning a handful of years were migrated to WordPress.
In addition, Crowd Favorite led the design process resulting in a responsive layout that adapts to smaller tablet and mobile browser sizes.
Project lead, Eric Marcoullier on the success of the project:
Working with Crowd Favorite has been a fantastic experience. They’ve been a great partner and we’re proud of the stellar launch of Beatport News.
Overall, we're very pleased with how the new design and site looks, feels, and functions. Be sure to check it out.
Design for desktop and mobile
As the web evolves, we found that a site intending to be the best in its category should work well on tablet and mobile devices. When we presented our initial design concepts for full-width browser we also presented the possibility of collapsing the design for mobile browsers. In the end, we created a blog design that looks great and works well on any modern browser.
Featured Posts and Events
Since so much is published on a daily basis, we helped create a custom trigger to feature posts at the top of the home page or mark them as upcoming events in the sidebar. WordPress taxonomies and post meta allowed us to build this specific to Beatport’s needs with minimal effort.
Custom media player shortcode
While many blogs leverage YouTube and Vimeo and other third-party media players, Beatport has and hosts its own. We built a custom shortcode so that Beatport writers and editors could quickly and easily refer to Beatport tracks and allow for updates and future changes to the player code (if anything in the embed changes in the future, it can be tweaked in one place).
Fast implementation with Carrington Core
We went into the project knowing that a quick re-launch was one of the main goals. As always, we used the Carrington Core theme framework to allow our designer and front-end developer to build much more of the theme with less involvement needed from a back-end developer. The ability to go further, faster allowed us to implement the designs as a WordPress theme in record time.
Thousands of posts from ExpressionEngine
Over the years we’ve helped a number of clients move from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. Leveraging some custom export templates we’ve built, we were able to accurately and completely move all the necessary content out of the existing community site into a series of WordPress WXR files that could then be imported using the WordPress Importer. With some minor development, we were also able to import and set the existing “primary photos” for each article as the WordPress “featured image” allowing existing content to fit nicely into the new design.
