Mid-size daily newspaper site on WordPress

  • Jon Bourne

    (@akbigdog)


    17 years, 7 months ago

    I am in charge of the Web site for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the largest daily newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the second largest paper in the state. As of this post, everything on the primary domain (not subdomains) is hosted using WordPress. The theme is custom, a port of the existing site design to a WP template. Some content is created via custom scripting and pulled in from other open-source software packages.

    To give an idea of our size: the News-Miner’s daily print circulation is about 20,000. Weekends are about 24,000. The Web site receives about 1.6 million page views per month.

    Are there other daily newspapers out there that use WordPress for their main sites?

    http://newsminer.com

    Questions and comments are welcome and encouraged.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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  • moshu

    (@moshu)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    Very nice job! (says an ex-journalist 🙂

    vkaryl

    (@vkaryl)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    Wow! *applauds* VERY nice. Readable, usable…. you’ve done a super job!

    Dgold

    (@dgold)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    I have used WP for a print-publication’s website, but not nearly that large on content and readership.

    Nice job on the layout!

    chuckevans

    (@chuckevans)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    Great looking site – we’ve been looking to do something like this for a long time but just have not found a decent template.

    chuck

    xinfo

    (@xinfo)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    Good design

    Well i have few questions about your site
    Hope you can share with us

    1, can i know you sever specification since you said 1.6 million per month, even I have high tafic web site I face some issue when I have huge hit ,
    2, which plugin you’re using on classified section

    I found other magazine kind website using word press http://www.usmagazine.com/

    Regard’s Xinfo

    Thread Starter Jon Bourne

    (@akbigdog)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    Thanks for the kind words, everyone. I’ve put a lot of work into the site, and it’s nice to hear that I’ve done well.

    xinfo, in answer to your questions:

    1. We are using a single XServe with dual 1.33 GHZ PowerPC G4 processors and 1.75 GB RAM on a full T1 connection. Our average outgoing data transfer is about 400 Kb/s.

      The home page was loading very slowly during our morning rush around 8:00, so I created my own file-based cache of the three main sections of the home page–news, opinion and sports. I extract these from the database with my own SQL calls and save the results to simple TXT files on the server. If these files a) exist and b) are not older than 10 minutes, I then include them into the template; if they are older than 10 minutes, I update them and then include them. This method of caching optimized the database calls from the home page from 22 queries down to 7 and really sped up the site, which was especially noticeable in the mornings.

    2. The classifieds portion of the site was written from scratch using PHP and MySQL. I parse a flat text file that comes from our in-house classifieds system each day and insert the ads into the database, from which I then pull them out based on what the user clicks. The classifieds site is not running on WordPress at all.

    Thread Starter Jon Bourne

    (@akbigdog)

    17 years, 7 months ago

    I think usmagazine.com is using Drupal, not WordPress.

    Neil De Souza

    (@ntdsouza)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    http://www.7days.ae

    This is a nice and simple website.

    I’m personally designing a website for a weekly paper on wordpress. Let’s see how it goes.

    menj

    (@menj)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    Man you guys need to have a tutorial out on how to do these….been looking for something like these all this while.

    – MENJ

    xinfo

    (@xinfo)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    recently usmagazine.com changed the cms so many year’s there running with word press
    check this link :http://wordpress.org/support/topic/70303?replies=52

    mylagoon

    (@mylagoon)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    I checked the source code on the homepage and it indicates that usmagazine.com is using Drupal. I think in the support link you provided that guy is talking about a sub-site of usmagazine.com, not the whole site.

    mlevenstein

    (@mlevenstein)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    What a great-looking site. I’m intrigued that you are using WordPress, yet the site does not have any “blog” characteristics (posts, comments, etc.). I have a lot to learn clearly.

    Bodhipaksa

    (@haecceity)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    Great job.

    I’m in the process of recreating a well-visited website of mine on WordPress and I’m a bit concerned about whether the database will be able to deliver content enough. So I’d be interested to know how many visitors per hour you were getting during that morning rush period when things were slowing down.

    Bodhipaksa

    (@haecceity)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    BTW, had you thought about using JS to have the AP national news and local news in one box, using tabs to separate the content? I think the sidebar would look more compact that way, and there would be less repetition.

    douglaseye

    (@douglaseye)

    17 years, 5 months ago

    We just started using a customized version of WordPress for our blogs at the Charleston Gazette in Charleston, W.Va. . We were so exasperated with blogger.com, we fled from them to WordPress. Don’t ask me about the tech details — my PHP computer whiz did it, I as I am the content editor of thegazz.com, the online multimedia magazine of the Gazette.

    Take a look at:
    http://www.thegazz.com/gblogs/gazzopolis/

    Douglas Imbrogno | thegazz.com editor

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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