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This is a monthly newsletter published by Gear Patrol's Corporate team to highlight important technology platform updates. To stay in the loop between editions, follow along on Slack in #technology-platform-updates.

Over three weeks, Eric and Caitlyn met with small groups of CMS stakeholders on the Content, Commerce, SEO, Commercial, and Creative teams to unpack pain points and wishlist items for our migration to Wordpress VIP. Many pain points and wish list items span multiple teams, from a request for version control (a core Wordpress VIP feature!) to more flexible, custom-designed templates (which we'll be crafting with 10UP). We’ll continue adding to this doc and use it to guide both the initial migration and our long-term product roadmap.

Beyond the CMS itself, we are interviewing a slew of vendors to replace our current tech stack, from social scheduling tools to video players. We’ve conducted initial vetting on two strong video player platforms with Wordpress VIP integrations:

Dailymotion

and

Connatix

. Both offer performant video player technology that encompasses our MediaOS capabilities and more, along with strong monetization capabilities. After initial diligence of these platforms, including revenue projections, we’ll dig deeper with teams that utilize video to schedule demos and make the final call.

Parse.ly is a go-to analytics platform for publishers at CondeNast, WSJ, Bloomberg, and more, and we’ve negotiated to have it included in our WordpressVIP package. An internal demo of the platform is scheduled for Wednesday, March 8 at 1 PM ET. If you’d like to attend, join the invite or reply to this email. In the meantime, if you’d like to get ahead, watch this short overview of the Parse.ly platform. 

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