Conde Nast Digital / Style.com / Vogue

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Python/Flask, Jinja2, Webpack, Babel, ES6, Grunt, NPM

Conde Nast Digital (CND) is the department responsible for the websites and services belonging to Conde Nast brands in the UK.

At the time CND were in the process of transitioning from a legacy .NET stack to an in-house Python based stack (codenamed project Merlin). The systems built on top of the stack include: RESTful API, CMS and consumer-facing websites.

Initially I was brought in to work on the integration of the second party (owned by Conde Nast) e-commerce platform Style.com with the Vogue website. Style.com allows brands to sell products on third-party websites (such as vogue.co.uk).

The bulk of my time however was spent on the re-platforming of brand websites from the legacy .NET stack to the Merlin stack, and on building a first implementation of a digital subscriptions mobile app using the PugPig white label digital magazine mobile app solution. Content syndication was significant part of this role.

Merlin re-platforming

This part of the contract assignment involved building a Flask web app for each brand's website, which read data from various Merlin REST APIs (articles, images, magazine covers etc), and generated web pages using Jinja2 templates.

Another part of developing the brand websites was to integrate with Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) to help syndicate articles to the Facebook platform.

Digital Subscriptions (PugPig)

The digital subscriptions element of this assignment involved moving the existing subscription enabled mobile app from the Adobe Digital Editions/.NET stack to a stack build on Merlin/PugPig.

PugPig is platform which enables big publishers to create native mobile apps relatively easily.

Integration involved creating a Python/Flask web app which generated the views for various content artefacts which included:

  1. OPDS catalogue XML feed
  2. OPDS issue XML feed
  3. article web pages
  4. cache manifests

These content artefacts where ingested into the PugPig platform by their web crawler for use by their white label native mobile apps.

cnd_styledotcom