EE in the Wild: Seed Magazine

Seed Magazine, a science print periodical and website has relaunched and is now powered by ExpressionEngine. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in science and technology.

Tim Murtaugh, the web developer at Seed Media Group, was kind enough to send me some insider information on how the site was created.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?

We chose ExpressionEngine mainly because of the flexible nature of the templating system, but also because of EE’s ability to completely customize the content input fields. This means that our editors are able to input their content without having to massage it or force it into place—there is a field for every piece of data associated with an article.

Can you give some insight as to how the site is built in EE?

Our EE installation is actually pretty standard—we didn’t have to install many add-ons to do what we wanted. The biggest add-on is the Tags module from Solspace, which does exactly what you think it would, and is exactly what we needed. I extended the functionality of the pages for each tag just a tad by calling in additional templates based on the tag name—this allows us to associate bits of extra content beyond just the tagged articles with each tag, as you can see here: http://seedmagazine.com/content/tag/research/

As for plugins, we’re using:

• HTML Stripper for cleaner Title and Meta tags
• The Magpie RSS parser to pull in content from our sister site ScienceBlogs
• Simple Pagination to enable smarter pagination on the article pages
• SS Friendly 404 to offer suggestions if a user hits a bad link

Extensions:

• Checkbox and Radio, for more custom field options
• Edit Alert to help avoid multiple editors working on one article

Each of the departments (World, Ideas, etc) are categories, and the
featured items on each departmental landing page (as well as everything on the home page except the list of departmental articles) are put in place by editors who assign article ID numbers to template variables.

It’s a great site and thanks to Tim for giving us an insider look!