Successful Partnership with Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly Website

A couple months ago, we teamed up with Stockholm-based software company Seibo Software Studios to bring the new version of the Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly website to life. There were two major requirements: 1. Develop a the new website using WordPress 2. Improve the old website. After meeting with Rickard Carlsson, we were able to identify most of the client’s needs and plan a project of three two-week sprints.

The challenge here was to provide Rickard with an admin interface to create articles and group them into issues. Each issue has a cover page, and covers and articles can have multiple authors.

The biggest challenge was porting over 400 articles from the old site to the new one.

The first sprint focused on installing WordPress, plugins, creating post types and adding custom fields. The second sprint covered the site’s look & feel, coding the WordPress widget to show the issues index and the author index. The final sprint wrapped everything up. The task of porting the content started at the very beginning and wasn’t over until the very end. As usual, we made good use of Scrapy for screen-scraping the old site and dump the content into WordPress import files. The old markup was such a bad enemy that we ended editing more than 400 articles manually to give them a clean design.

We are very pleased to have executed the project exactly as planned (this doesn’t happen very often in the tech industry). We enjoyed the project, and it was great to learn a lot about Scandinavian public libraries and the people who work together to make all this information available.