Daily Kos

Daily Kos is an independent, reader-funded progressive media and community platform where professional journalism lives right alongside stories written by the people who read it. For two decades, it has grown into something more than a news site. It’s a place where members create their own posts, form groups, build profiles, and organize around the causes they care about. That mix of staff reporting and grassroots voices makes Daily Kos a genuinely community-owned space, shaped every day by the millions of people who show up to participate.

When it came time to move twenty years of history onto WordPress VIP, the team at XWP took on a migration of remarkable scale: 1.5 million posts, 2.7 million users, 88 million comments, and 1.4 million images, all carried over from a custom legacy CMS without losing the participatory culture that made the site special. The build pairs Gutenberg for flexible editorial layouts with BuddyPress for community features, plus Viafoura for conversations and PostHog for analytics and experimentation. More than 500 community members joined a public beta to help get it right. It’s a wonderful example of WordPress serving not as a conventional newsroom tool, but as living, community-owned publishing infrastructure that handles editorial work, member contributions, moderation, subscriptions, and donations at an impressive scale.

Presented at WordCamp US 2026: When the Platform Belongs to Its Users: Migrating Daily Kos at Scale