Where to See VIP and Friends at WordCamp US 2017

We hope to see you tomorrow and this weekend, December 1-3 at WordCamp US in Nashville or the next best thing, remote via free livestream. With so many fantastic sessions going on all weekend, we put together a guide to which ones feature folks from across the extended VIP family:

WordCamp US 2016 in Philly, uploaded by Seth Goldstein under CC-BY-SA 2.0

On Friday:

Last year’s State of the Word, uploaded by Luca Sartoni under CC-By-SA 2.0

On Saturday:

And also:

    Stop by the Gutenberg usability testing booth, where Tammie Lister and other members of the Gutenberg team will take you through short tasks and a brief survey designed to gather data that will inform bug stomping and fine-tuning.

And if you can’t make it in person, you can also grab a free ticket to catch the live stream of the entire weekend’s sessions.

Photo by Tammie Lister

USA Today Sports Media Group on the Benefits of a Common Theme

USA Today Sports Media Group on the Benefits of a Common Theme

When newly acquired publications and sites come in to a large publishing group, they often come with baggage: their own approach to UX and underlying technologies. These unique themes and feature sets can add up to significant technical and operational debt. It’s a whole lot of tools and processes that only exist for one project’s benefit. And in most cases, those unique systems bring with them a distinction without a difference – there’s little benefit to the end user that’s gained from that diversity of approach. It’s just history.

This is a set of issues that we’ve seen again and again. Bringing groups of publications together under a common theme and architecture can reap tremendous rewards, across speed, productivity, and cost savings.

David Parsons, USA Today Sports Media Group

Earlier this month at the BigWP meetup in NYC, David Parsons of USA Today offered a peek into the evolution of the company’s Sports Media Group and its underlying systems. His team worked with WordPress VIP to migrate a number of sites, each with its own unique theme hosted on Amazon, over to WordPress VIP. All of the sites are now under their shared Lawrence theme, with a system called Wasabi that can turn on and off features from site to site.

Here’s David explaining the history of the project and the ways working with WordPress VIP frees his team up to focus on what’s most important:

“When we first started off, we wanted to be as lightweight as possible and we were picking up these extremely heavy CMS’s that aren’t necessarily WordPress. So what we initially did is move everything to WordPress as fast as possible, and we hosted this ourselves on the Amazon platform. And we had site-specific themes, so every codebase for every site was completely unique.

We soon realized that there were a lot of issues with this, especially when a site goes down, or we have an issue overnight. Obviously there’s the potential of losing thousands of dollars. As soon as possible we moved to WordPress VIP, and we moved to a platform called Lawrence, which is essentially a shared theme. By moving to WordPress VIP, we were able to not worry about downtime, and whenever we push our code up for deployment, they run an additional code check to make sure we’re not pushing anything up to production that could potentially be catastrophic. Things like security we no longer have to think about. So this allows our team to focus on building awesome stuff.”

USAT-image.pngThe ability to create and launch new sites quickly, and centrally control the feature set for each one or a group of them, enabled the Sports Media Group team to quickly test a concept for a new set of NFL team sites, and then roll it out across all 32 teams:

In this next clip, David explains how the WordPress Customizer manages various look and feel elements for each site.

Site-by-site feature interface

He also describes the plugin interface, depicted above, that allows the team to easily control features site by site, and apply functionality created for one to any or all of them:

You can follow David on Twitter at @dpjustice.

And to be notified of the next BigWP event in New York, join the Meetup group. There are also enterprise events throughout the year in various other big cities.

If you’d like to hear more about how WordPress VIP can free your teams up to focus on publishing, get in touch.

WordPress.com VIP Supports Women in Digital Journalism at ONA

I am so proud to share that WordPress.com VIP was a sponsor at  this year’s ONA Women’s Leadership Accelerator at USC. This was our second year supporting the program, and my second year spending time there. We’re proud to help make the program completely tuition-free for the participants.

image-uploaded-from-ios-3

WLA is a weeklong forum aimed at developing strong leadership skills for women working in digital journalism. Twenty-five women were chosen from 350 applicants to spend a week developing leadership and management skills. Speakers included Kara Swisher, Recode co-founder; Liz Heron, former Huffington Post executive editor; and Charo Henriquez, former executive editor of People En Espanol.

By sheer coincidence, my former boss from the Chicago Tribune was this year’s facilitator. Tran Ha, the former Editor and General Manager of the RedEye, was my first manager out of college. Both last year and this year, I got to sit in the back of the classroom as the facilitator coached attendees on problem-solving in the workplace with real-life examples. The very candid discussions about the difficult parts of leaderships allowed women to connect with each other – and hopefully build a support network to help each other throughout their careers. It was also terrific to see many VIP clients represented: The Atlantic, The New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, and FiveThirtyEight.

image-uploaded-from-ios

Tran asked me to participate as a mentor, and I spent the afternoon working with four women, from AJ+, NPR, The Guardian, and Vice. The topics we worked on together included hiring and leading a remote team, project managing engineers, and how to innovate within a busy daily news cycle. Later that evening, I gave a two-part presentation at dinner.

For the first part, I talked about the open-source ethos that powers WordPress. Earlier in my career, I worked in newsrooms and used WordPress daily. Back then I knew the software and dashboard very well, but didn’t know the mission behind it all: to democratize publishing. I wanted the help the leaders of newsrooms understand why supporting open source is so important.

For the second part, I talked about transitioning from a fairly gender-balanced workplace in editorial, to a mostly-male workplace at the intersection of journalism and technology about five years ago. I talked about the challenges of imposter syndrome and making your voice heard when you’re a minority, and reminded the women in the room that they are an important change in the wave of diversity in leadership at journalism and tech companies.

I’m thrilled that VIP was a part of this event for the second year in a row, and I’m looking forward to seeing these women excel across the industry!

For more reading, you can keep an eye on the rising stars here. If you’re interested in learning more about women leaders the digital media space, definitely check out Katie Hawkins-Garr’s newsletter from the The Poynter Institute. It’s an incredible read and a great way to find out about amazing things women are doing in journalism and technology.

With the US Election, a Landmark Week for WordPress VIP

There were mixed feelings on the WordPress VIP team last week when a joke about one of our customers went viral.

Reports of obsessive refreshing of the US election predictions on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site, hosted on WordPress VIP, began to appear in late October. As Election Day got ever closer, things reached a fever pitch.

https://twitter.com/sam_baker/status/793834173299433472

https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/794914863080423424

https://twitter.com/msgwenl/status/795471268975939584

https://twitter.com/nabeelib/status/796128559148347392

One of the campaigns even felt the need to send an email to supporters, urging them to “stop refreshing FiveThirtyEight” and focus on getting out the vote instead.

Things really went into overdrive when the team fired up their Election Day liveblog. The first calls were made at 7pm Eastern; traffic surged as visitors looked for guidance on the clues each new result gave to the final, surprising outcome.

By midnight, FiveThirtyEight had posted—in a single day—the kind of traffic numbers we would usually expect of the most popular, mass-appeal sites we host… over the course of a week. Not bad for a nerdy site all about statistics.

We’re absolutely delighted to see a customer doing so well, but the WordPress VIP team were all too aware of the responsibility on our shoulders. We knew our systems and practices would face their sternest test ever—even if constant refreshing hadn’t become a new national pastime.

It wasn’t just FiveThirtyEight, of course. With so many WordPress VIP customers in the news business, many of the sites we host saw significant traffic spikes on Election Day, or for those addressing audiences living several timezones away (like News.com.au or Indian Express), the day after. Follow-up coverage on Thursday saw at least one major site post a new record number of page views.

I’m happy to say that we coped admirably. Independent monitoring by Pingdom shows 100% uptime for the week, and barely a blip in terms of average response time.

Part of WordPress VIP’s appeal is that we ensure you’re ready for high-traffic events like this: the ones you can predict, and the ones you can’t. With so many sites, from so many places, covering so many subjects, we simply have to be prepared for the most extreme scenarios.

WordPress VIP customers share the same high-capacity global infrastructure as the WordPress.com platform, consistently ranked as one of the web’s busiest properties. And our engineers work with each site’s developers to ensure their code is as efficient and performant as possible.

Customers are often anxious about traffic spikes. But really, they should be something to look forward to: these are the times your website truly earns its stripes.

A vibrant Fourth Estate will be more important than ever in the next few years—and it will need to be fast and performant for readers around the world. If WordPress VIP can deliver for FiveThirtyEight, the national focal point on one of the most dramatic election nights in history, you can be confident we can deliver on your big night too. We dare you to put us to the test.

Building the Apple News WordPress Plugin

At a BigWP meetup at the New York Post, Bradford Campeau-Laurion from Alley Interactive talked about building the Apple News WordPress plugin for the New York Post.

You can view his slides here.

For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Building alpha.phila.gov in the open with WordPress

At a Hacks/Hackers + BigWP meetup at the Comcast Center, Karissa Demi from the City of Philadelphia talks about building alpha.phila.gov on WordPress.

View her slides here.

For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Contributor Relationship Management: CRM in WP

At a BigWP meetup at the New York Post, Roger Theriault, Sagar Sood, Steve McNally from Hearst presented on creating a contributor network in WordPress.

You can view their slides here.

For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Scaling WordPress: Code Review on WordPress.com VIP

At a Hacks/Hackers + BigWP meetup at the Comcast Center, Philip John presents on code review on the WordPress.com VIP platform, and scaling WordPress.

View his slides here, and VIP’s code review guidelines here.

See the presentations from previous Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetups. For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Technically Media: How we built our publishing stack

At a recent Hacks/Hackers + BigWP meetup at the Comcast Center, Brian James Kirk and Cary Betagole presented on how Technically Media built their publishing tech stack.

View their slides here.

For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.