Description
Development, Platform Migration, WordPress Development, Hosting
Time-Span
5 Months
Background
Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and directs the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. A leading climate scientist, he is the author of books including The New Climate War and Our Fragile Moment.
His site ran on Drupal and held an enormous archive of news, interviews and events. We partnered with designer Grace Chi of WanderGrace, who led the design and project, while we handled development and the migration to WordPress.
Objectives
Goals for michaelmann.net:
- Move the site from Drupal to WordPress without losing the archive
- Make thousands of news items and interviews searchable and filterable
- Bring events, books and media into a modern design
- Make sure links look great when shared on social media
Challenges
The archive was the heart of the project: about 4,000 news and interview items and more than 400 events, with details like bylines stored as free text rather than structured fields.
Content also kept changing on the old site during the build, so the migration had to be repeatable.
Discovery & Planning
Working from Grace's designs, we mapped every type of content on the old site to a structured home in WordPress, so the archive would be searchable rather than just copied over.
Design & Build
The design by WanderGrace leads with Dr. Mann's work as a scientist, author and speaker. We built it in WordPress with a custom theme so his team can update it easily.
News Archive
We migrated about 4,000 news and interview items into a structured archive with search and filters, and later recovered more than 700 older items from web archives and filled in missing authors and sources.
Books & Media
Book pages with resources, a full CV, more than 400 events and a high-resolution media gallery round out the site.
Launch & Hosting
We started in September 2024 and launched in February 2025, with social share previews tuned after launch. We host the site and continue to improve the archive.
Conclusion
michaelmann.net preserves a decade and more of public work in a site that's finally easy to search and share.
It's a great example of partnering with a design studio and taking on a complex migration.
“This really looks fantastic upon a first perusal. You guys have done a really nice job with this.”
Dr. Michael E. Mann
