Forbes Italia
Headless editorial platform — 2024–25 edition
- Role
- Technical Lead — architecture & delivery
- Period
- 2023 – 2025 · ~2 years in production
- Stack
- Next.js · Laravel · Python · Headless WordPress
- Client
- Forbes Italia · IDI Group
(01) Context
Forbes Italia is one of the highest-traffic business news sites in Italy. Its legacy WordPress monolith had reached its limits: performance, editorial workflows and the ambition to bring AI into the newsroom all pointed to a rebuild.
(02) Challenge
Replatform a site that cannot afford downtime or SEO regressions, keep a newsroom of dozens of editors productive through the transition, and leave room for AI features that didn't exist yet when the architecture was drawn.
(03) Approach
I designed a headless architecture: WordPress kept as the editorial backend the newsroom already knew, a Laravel service layer in between, and a Next.js frontend built for Core Web Vitals and SEO. Python services handle the data and AI side. I led the delivery team through the migration and owned the architecture end to end.
(04) AI in the newsroom
On top of the platform we integrated AI-assisted editorial features — article summarization, automated tagging, semantic search — orchestrated across multiple LLM providers and designed to assist editors, not replace them.
(05) Outcome
The new platform shipped and served millions of readers for two years as the site's 2024–25 edition. For an editorial frontend at that traffic, two years in production is a long, healthy life.
This case study covers the 2024–25 edition of forbes.it, which I architected and led. The site has since moved on to its next redesign — as high-traffic editorial platforms do.