WordPress For News And Media Word Camp Uk 2009

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Notes on slide 1

WordPress can be used for both... Don’t linger on bullet points in case you bore people to death...

Express and Star guys are here, and they really broke new ground in the UK by using WP for their entire site.

Google Trends isn’t the be all and end allSearches for news is pretty flat – people already know where they go for it in the mainstream.More people writing newsMore aggregators bringing it all togetherMore relevance to particular marketsFunny how the Financial news picked up a lot lately.Some sectors are dropping in search terms – because people already know where to go for their news – opportunities for new news sites are probably reducing.But still just the same amount of time to read the newsTherefore less time for each news item... What does that mean?

So many things missing from WPMU core – global search, useful cross blog user management.I discovered something – in WPTavern’s forums I made a joke about “retired colonels going apoplectic about the changes, but that was to be expected...” I so didn’t expect a commenter on a Telegraph blog to find it and use it against both ourselves and the team. The suggestion was that we should take a 90% pay cut. Which given the cost of a train fare to London these days would have meant that we’d have been paying to help them!

Hard numbers are commercially sensitive but you can see the trend – graph begins with WP go-live.We’re looking at 30%-50% improvements over the first quarter post implementation on a typical site. Better engagement means visitors return again and again to read comments, see replies to their comments, etc.Chart is actually an amalgam of several news sites over a quarter or so (ie, where we could gather data from Compete, Alexa and server stats)... A few big digg effects.

Extra Excerpt/Title to be released to GPL soon.Caribou News is our own freebie offering for those wishing to set up a WP News site, the others are good too, but ours is the only one (so far as we are aware) that supports sections.

Quote from the editor at Telecoms.com: The previous system was a bespoke Java-based platform developed in house. In short, it was a nightmare - inflexible, inefficient, and clunky. By comparison, Wordpress is a dream, and the best thing is, less technical users find it intuitive and easy to get along with. As a successful blogging platform you can tell a lot of time and effort has been invested in making it a slick and productive tool, and that translates well when using it as a business CMS too.

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WordPress For News And Media Word Camp Uk 2009 - Presentation Transcript

WordPressforNews &Media
Presented by
David Coveney
WordCamp UK 2009
Introduction
‘It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.’
Jerry Seinfeld
Types of Site
Blogs
Chronologically ordered
Semantically structure
No sections
Open to commenting
Part of a community
Strongly interlinked
Typically 0-5 posts a day
News & Magazine
Chronologically ordered
Semantically structured
Multiple sections
Closed to commenting
Community leading
More incoming links
3-many posts a day
Key WP UK News & Media Sites
Spearhead sites from some large organisations
Telegraph Blogs the busiest
Telecoms.com most sophisticated?
Metro big users of open source, WP project gaining momentum
News is Growing & Diversifying
News Blogging
Telegraph Blogs biggest in the UK
Performance
Interconnecting multiple MU blogs
WPMU Dev valuable for blog networks
But for some requirements, you have to do quite a bit of coding
WordPress as a News Platform
Think about sheer quantity of data
Sections can be by blog (WPMU)
Or a single WP site
Use categories
Or get clever with widgets & categories
Effects of WordPress
Social plugins
Google News
Easier Publishing
Better Visitor Engagement
So You Want A News Site in WP?
Plugins
Extra Excerpt
Social Bookmarking
User Photo
WP Navigation List Plugin
WP Popular Posts
WP-Polls
Related Articles
WP Super-Cache
Themes
Caribou News
Mimbo/Mimbo Pro
Fresh News
The Journal
StudioPress
Telecoms.com
One of the first full news sites from a major group
Up to 50% traffic improvement
Four box serving
Load balancer, front end cache
Two Apache servers
One mySQL server
Shared with other Informa sites
Configurable Content Aggregation Widgets
New section page = new widget space
Telecoms.com Back-end Demo
The Future
More News Sites
WP & WPMU Integrated
BuddyPress
Thanks and any Questions?
David Coveney
http://twitter.com/davecoveney
http://www.interconnectit.com
http://spectacu.la
0151 709 7977