Lehtiyhtymä had previously used eZ Publish as the publishing platform of their 17 online publications. This proved unsuccessful and difficult for their purposes. Mearra was tasked to rethink the online publishing of 17 newspapers published by Lehtiyhtymä. The project included changing the editorial workflows, designing a Drupal platform to run multiple different sites on, migrating existing data and integrating existing systems to the new platform. The need was to do better cheaper: make publishing more efficient, flexible and cheaper to maintain and make new forms of marketing possible. First site lansivayla.fi was published late 2010 and remaining 16 sites were published all at the same time in early 2011.

The customer had previous bad experiences with many different web consultants not staying on time, budget or project goals. Because of the background, the project budget was very tight and we had to work against some bad expectations. Mearra successfully implemented almost completely automated easy-to-use publishing system which enabled lively online publication both for the visitors and the creators of the website Mearra managed to stay within the budget and to deliver the project three months ahead of schedule. Usability of the editorial workflows was vastly improved and all set project goals were met or exceeded.

“I’ve worked over 10 years with online publications and this was the first project EVER to succeed perfectly in every way” -A-P. Pietilä, Editor-in-Chief, CEO