A daily newspaper site built in WordPress

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2007 at 18:18
Tags: Blogs, Drupal, Express & Star, Moveable Type, Shropshire Star, Wordpress

Britain’s largest paid-circulation regional newspaper, the Express & Star in Wolverhampton, is using the free open source blogging software WordPress as the content management system of its web site, which had 162,820 unique users in April.

Its Midlands News Association sister title, the Shropshire Star (95,612 unique users, 4/2007 ABCe) uses a similar WordPress template.

The sites, created by consultancy Design UK, went live nearly a year ago, but I never bothered to look at the sites very carefully until recently. The telltale signs are all there in the source code. Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg spotted it yesterday, and is very impressed.

The attraction of using blogging software as the basis of a newspaper site is obvious — it’s free, it allows rapid creation of new category structures based on tagging, and there is a robust commenting system built for each story. Furthermore, the Wordpress plugin system means adding on new functionality is relatively simple. The Midlands papers appear to be using a freely-available polling plug-in, for example.

For several months now, Trinity Mirror has also been using blogging software as the backend for some of its local weeklies. Moveable Type is the platform behind Buckinghamshire Advertiser and the Southport Visiter’s Southport Communities site (which was shortlisted for an AOP award this year).

The Press Gazette regional newspaper web site of the year, Gazette Live in Teesside, also uses Movable Type for its hyperlocal site, Gazette Communities (which keeps winning awards).

Lots of sites use MT or WordPress for small blog sections of their sites, I’m not aware of any other daily newspapers using basic blogging tools to run their entire sites, though.

Anyone?

Trinity Mirror’s new local site is… a blog.

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 March 2007 at 13:29
Tags: Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Moveable Type, Trinity Mirror

Trinity Mirror’s Buckinghamshire Advertiser has relaunched its web site.

It’s very cleanly designed. But there’s something significant that is unusual about it — it’s a blog. The front page is three recent stories presented in reverse-chronological order, with each one allowing comments. There’s a list of categories, RSS feeds, and even a tag cloud. Each new upload of a story pings Technorati.

Of course, blogs are defined by their conversational nature rather than their technical capabilities. So more precisely, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser is a newspaper site powered by blog software.

A quick examination of the source code for the site reveals that the content management system powering it is Movable Type, the software produced by Six Apart that also powers the Guardian’s many blogs, not to mentioned thousands of individual bloggers’.

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.