Sing Out! is a folk music magazine that’s been publishing since 1950. I met editor Mark Moss some years ago at a music conference, and we’ve been working together on the magazine’s website ever since.

On its previous makeover back in 2008, the site was hand-coded using a Dreamweaver template, but that sliced home page was getting harder and harder to maintain. In addition, the site has hundreds of active hand-coded pages based on a template, with no compelling reason (or budget, or time…) to change them.

So how to bridge the two? First, we developed the new front page design by adapting graphic elements we already had in the hand-coded site. The old and new pages aren’t exactly the same, but not so jarringly different as to be confusing. The old site’s drop-down menus were made with AllWebMenus; and those developers have a WordPress plugin. To make it work, we had to generate two versions of the javascript; one for the hand-coded side and one for the WordPress, but after some tweaking we got everything positioned. The new site uses the Weaver II Pro theme with features such as “pages with posts” and multiple page layouts.

SO! now posts music and video reviews to the site on a regular basis (outside the quarterly print cycle), has incorporated its folk music news service into the site (from a standalone blog on wordpress.com), lists all the folk festivals and camps nationwide (this feature migrated away from the paper magazine a couple of years ago) and is in the process of adding the complete run of the topical folk song magazine Broadside (started in 1962) to the site.

SO! is worth your time to check out the site, as well as your support of their mission over 60-plus years of sharing songs, stories, and resources about the world’s folk music traditions.