Today the Television Academy Foundation's The Interviews relaunched on a rebuilt platform. The Interviews brings television history to life through in-depth conversations with people in front of and behind the camera, and connects those recordings with the shows, people, professions and subjects discussed in them.
Behind the public site is MASH, the catalogue the archive team uses to manage records and send content to the public site. FivePaths rebuilt both Drupal sites together.
Two sites, one publishing workflow
The separation between MASH and the public website is an established part of how the archive works, and the team wanted to keep it. Our job was to carry that arrangement onto the rebuilt platform while improving individual tools along the way.
That meant treating the catalogue as connected records. An interview can have several recorded parts, clips identify passages within those parts, and catalogue relationships connect them with shows, people, topics, professions and genres. On the public site, those relationships give visitors several routes into a long conversation. The connection between the two sites has to recognize the matching public record whenever editors export a change, so updates land in the right place.
Moving both sites at once
Public visitors already knew the Interviews website, and editors had routines they relied on. Keeping existing public URLs was a core requirement. We checked Pathauto patterns against titles and added redirect handling for older links that carried an extra /interviews prefix.
Testing followed the route content actually takes. We asked the archive team to work with a small, varied set of interviews, older and newer and some with every field filled in, make typical edits in MASH, export them and check the result on the public site. Repeating that with different records exposed issues across the boundary between the two systems.
The librarians' part mattered. On the old publishing screen, a Title search let them find records to send to the public site even when nothing had changed recently. They used it constantly and noticed it was missing from the rebuilt Export screen. We restored it during testing.
The team
Tyler Shuster handled development, Jason Salter configured the site, Eric Leland managed the client relationship, and Beth Brockman helped with testing and QA. The archive team's knowledge of their own catalogue is what let us check the rebuilt workflow against real work.
We'll keep supporting both sites as they settle in and as the archive's needs change.