Flex is an American bodybuilding magazine, published by American Media, Inc and was founded in 1983 by Joe Weider.
Flex Online is the powerhouse of the sites on AMI's Global Platform, and has the most masculine design of them all. It inherits all of the customization of the Global Platform and is a leading resource in men’s bodybuilding world-wide.
Flex Online was developed on a proprietary CMS built in PERL. The AMI editorial team often struggled with content creation, requiring the intervention of their development company to help with HTML markup and PERL script hacking to achieve their desired goals. This often resulted in significant delays to article publishing and editing, in addition to increasing support costs from the developer. The custom CMS was not scalable, often requiring a reboot of Apache and MySQL in times of trouble, and Workhabit sought to quickly remedy that with the Drupal Platform.
Migrate Flex Online to the Drupal 6 global publishing platform that was developed for AMI by... you guessed it... Workhabit! This migration would put a collection of content types, views, menu systems and rotator components at the fingertips of the editorial team, with plenty of documentation provided to stanch maintenance requests. Then we added two of our favorite things: Varnish and Memcache to improve overall server performance and load times.
Utilizing our global publishing system allowed our team to deliver a site in record time (just shy of 12 weeks). The collection of views and components provided an editorial toolkit of presentation options for the Flex editorial staff, and the productivity of the editorial team exploded, requiring only a few minutes to insert copy and images into new articles.
