A magazine engineered to publish at scale.

A statewide lifestyle magazine publishes everywhere at once: on the web, in a print and digital edition, and in your inbox. Editors across a dozen departments needed to publish daily, readers wanted an events calendar and a business directory, and the newsletters had to reach a big list without buckling. A stock blog was never going to carry it.

We designed and hand-coded a custom WordPress theme, then built two plugins from scratch, a business directory and an events calendar, each with its own database and admin. We added a custom back-office console, separate from the standard WordPress admin, for photo galleries, data imports, and email. And we built a newsletter engine on top of SendGrid that ran branded editions to the magazine's subscribers. When the list grew, we re-engineered the sender from eighteen database queries per message down to three and moved to batched sending so it scaled. We ran a digital flip-book edition and a mobile site, and kept the whole thing patched, secure, searchable, and hosted across two provider migrations.

A platform that ran the better part of a decade. From 2011 to 2018 it powered daily publishing, a reader directory and events calendar, a digital magazine, and email editions to a large audience. Set Sail Media was embedded as the magazine's own development team the whole way.