Integrating Memberships and Printing into Digital

American Bonanza Society’s entire history is wrapped up in a collection of repair manuals, updates, and past magazines — the very history of the brand itself, dating back to the 1940s. With their new site, we needed a way to connect this content to its members … but also a way to connect its members to the site itself.

First, we developed an integration with ABS’ existing membership system, sharing information back and forth in order to manage both the CMS’ understanding of each user and the financial information necessary to keep those memberships up to date. Then, we needed to take on the biggest transition: moving decades of PDF-trapped magazine content and mechanical updates into the main site.

With mechanical updates, we simply uploaded, categorized, and named each PDF file, with a nod toward keeping them historically accurate and relevant for anyone with that particular model of aircraft. For magazine articles, however, we pulled content from the PDF to repurpose in HTML on the site, incorporating a common taxonomy of aircraft models, issue categories, and other topic groupings. This allows articles and documents to be pulled automatically into relevant feeds and topic pages. By tagging pages with keywords, we allowed the CMS to understand it’s context, which makes the system an ally instead of a burden — the perfect relationship for both the content and the editors.

What this allowed was a document library that was automatically filtered for the user’s relevant aircraft model, forum posts that are tied to relevant interests, and even magazine articles separated from their original issue and presented to the site user in a more relevant way.