Our Client

Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

What They Needed

Foreign Affairs wanted a new site built on a content management platform with an enhanced information architecture, design, and new features. This platform needed a sophisticated user access system that could seamlessly and securely integrate with their existing subscriber management, analytics, advertising, and search systems, as well as provide premium content to anonymous users from institutions with site licenses. Finally, Foreign Affairs needed to be able to deploy all the content for an issue from their development and staging environment to the live site with a single click, synchronizing data between multiple servers.

How We Helped

Drawing heavily on our detailed knowledge of the open source Web content management platform Drupal, we established an environment that would retain existing users while introducing new features and an enhanced information architecture and design developed by Concentric Studio. The new site design was implemented by Palantir in a standards-compliant and accessible manner using HTML, CSS, jQuery, and sIFR.

Existing data from over six decades worth of issues was imported using a custom import system built by Palantir. Content was organized along multiple taxonomies (vocabularies) with several categorizations through which readers could drill down from general categories to specific issues; content can now be navigated by date, region, topic, and author (among others), and any given article, essay, or book review is cataloged across these dimensions, an invaluable boon to researchers and academics who wish to browse the journal’s extensive catalog of current and back issues.

Palantir’s deep expertise in Drupal’s internals allowed us to rapidly merge several different authentication sources, allowing the journal’s 150,000 subscribers to immediately access content on the new site and participate in online discussions without having to create new accounts or take any steps to migrate to the new site. A tiered access scheme enables Foreign Affairs to easily administer what content can be freely accessed or requires a subscription to view. An IP address-based access system was built to allow visitors from institutions with existing site licenses to access premium content without having to log into the site.

To allow users to easily search for content across multiple Council on Foreign Relations sites, Palantir configured Drupal to interoperate with the organization’s Google Search Appliance, building custom metadata fields that conveyed detailed information to the search appliance without disrupting the user experience. Palantir integrated multiple analytics and advertising systems as well.

Finally, following best practices guidelines for editorial environments, Palantir built a content deployment system for Foreign Affairs, allowing content to be synchronized between the journal’s development, staging server, and production servers with a single click of the mouse. Security, reliability, and robustness were key requirements to this process. To meet these goals and still maintain high levels of performance, Palantir built a system that allowed the three Drupal instances to “talk to each other” and share content without relying upon an external system, enabling the use of advanced features, like selective bidirectional syncing of user-submitted content.

The Upshot

The new Foreign Affairs Web site is a dynamic resource that allows visitors from all walks of life to access, share, and engage in discussion on some of the most important issues faced by our world today. The new Web site allows the magazine to reach out to its readership in new ways while still upholding its role as the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and international affairs.

A detailed technical write-up of this project can be found at Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/node/518314