Newsroom CMS with Live Blogs and AMP

Project overview

We built a newsroom CMS and public news site for a digital publisher with reporters, desk editors and a homepage team working across several sections. Stories move from draft to published through a defined workflow, breaking news runs as live blogs, and every article is also served as an AMP page for fast mobile loading from search and social platforms.

The engagement covered editorial workflow discovery, UX for the editor interface, a Laravel back end, a Vue editorial front end, Elasticsearch-powered search, migration of the story archive and training. It is part of our web application development work for content-heavy businesses.

The client and the challenge

The publisher had outgrown a general-purpose blogging platform heavily modified with plugins. Editors overwrote each other's changes, there was no clear record of who approved a story, live coverage meant repeatedly republishing one article, and searching a large archive for background material was slow and inaccurate.

They needed a CMS built around how a newsroom actually works — desks, embargoes, corrections and homepage curation — with pages that stayed fast during traffic spikes on big news days.

Solution architecture & delivery

The Laravel back end models stories, sections, authors, tags, media and page layouts, and enforces a workflow of draft, submitted, edited, legal review where needed, scheduled and published. Permissions are role- and desk-based: reporters edit their own drafts, desk editors approve for their sections, and only the homepage team can change front-page slots. Every transition and every published revision is recorded, so corrections show exactly what changed and who approved it.

The Vue editor is a block-based writing interface with headlines, standfirsts, embeds, galleries and related links. When an editor opens a story someone else is working on, the editor is warned and the story is locked for editing, with a request-to-take-over option, so edits are never silently overwritten. Autosave keeps revision snapshots, and embargoed stories are scheduled to publish at a set time.

Live blogs are separate from articles: each update is a small post attached to the live event, written by any assigned reporter and published instantly. Readers' pages poll a lightweight endpoint for new updates and insert them above earlier posts without a full reload, while key updates can be pinned and a summary written when coverage ends. Both articles and live blogs render a standard page and an AMP version from the same content, with embeds converted to their AMP equivalents.

Elasticsearch indexes every story, live update, tag and author. Editors search the archive with filters and phrase matching while writing, the related-stories panel suggests links automatically, and readers get fast site search. Published pages are cached at the edge and purged when a story is updated, following the approach in our AWS architecture for high-traffic apps.

Key features we built

• Desk-based editorial workflow with approvals, embargoes and scheduling
• Block-based Vue editor with autosave, revisions and edit locking
• Live blogs with instant updates, pinned posts and closing summaries
• Automatic AMP versions of articles and live blogs
• Elasticsearch archive search and related-story suggestions
• Homepage and section front curation with drag-and-drop slots
• Media library with image crops, credits and captions
• Transparent corrections log and newsroom audit trail

How we delivered it

1. Discovery. Time with reporters, desk editors and the homepage team during a normal news day and a breaking news day, mapping workflow states and pain points in the old platform.
2. UX and prototype. Prototypes of the story editor, live blog console and homepage curation screen tested by working journalists on deadline-style tasks.
3. Build. Two-week sprints delivering the content model and workflow first, then live blogs, search, AMP rendering and homepage tools, with automated tests on publishing rules.
4. Archive migration and launch. Stories, authors, tags and images migrated with old URLs redirected to new ones, then a parallel run before switching the public site over.
5. Support. Ongoing maintenance, new story formats and AI-assisted drafting tools explored in a similar way to our AI content generation platform.

Technology choices

• Laravel — a productive PHP framework with queues, scheduling, policies for role-based permissions and a clean way to model editorial workflow states.
• Vue — reactive components for the block editor, live blog console and drag-and-drop homepage curation without heavy page reloads.
• Elasticsearch — full-text search with phrase matching, filters and relevance tuning across a large, growing archive of stories and updates.

Outcomes

• Editors no longer overwrite each other's work thanks to edit locking and revision history
• Every published story has a recorded approval path and visible corrections
• Breaking news runs as a live blog with instant updates rather than repeated republishing
• Journalists find background stories in the archive while they write
• Mobile readers arriving from search and social platforms get lightweight AMP pages
• The homepage team curates fronts directly instead of asking developers to change layouts

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