I was charged with the task of redoing the web site for Hudson Monthly.  If you look at the current iteration, you can see it needed some love in a big way.

I wanted to use Wordpress because it was a good way to provide the editor with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface without sucking up a ton of dev time.  We have dozens of sites like this one and without Wordpress mods I would likely spend most of my time working on them.  This web site had to accomplish a few things:

1. It couldn’t feel too much like a blog.
2. It had to provide a way of archiving old posts.
3. It had to provide a reliable, intuitive way for readers to access these archives.

Because archiving was important, I didn’t want to use pages to display the information in this publication.  One of the major limitations of pages in Wordpress is that a page, although technically a post, doesn’t allow for logical scalability. You create a page called “Recipes” and you add a bunch of recipes to it.  Say down the line you want to add a bunch more.  In a page situation, you would edit the original and add more recipes.  What happens when you have 3,000 recipes?  Your page is enormous, it probably won’t load, and you’ll probably run into problems editing it.  Fixing this down the line can be a real pain in the butt.

The best way to do it is using categories and a little Wordpress fancy dancing using the WP_Query(); function.  I’ll use an example from this publication.  Hudson Monthly has a “Making the Scene” section every month where a photographer goes to a local event and shoots pictures of the event and the people involved.  There is one of these per issue and it is monthly.  Knowing this, my objectives were as follows:

1. Show an excerpt of the latest “Making the Scene” story on the main page with a link to the full version.
2. Link to the latest “Making the Scene” story from every page on the site.
3. Link to a list of stories from this section from the main page.

For the sake of archiving everything on the site, every single entry had to be a blog post.  The only page on the site would be the contact page because that would rarely (if ever) change and needed no archive.  Therefore, I set up a bunch of new categories, one of which was Making the Scene.  I also went into the permalink settings and set my category permalinks to be /section/category-name to be more indicative of a print product and not a blog.

For each of my objectives, I needed a query.  Luckily, the wonderful Wordpress API has a function to handle this baked in.

<?php $mts_single = new WP_Query('category_name=making-the-scene&showposts=1'); ?>

This line of code drags only the latest post from the making-the-scene category.  Creating a loop with this query is easy, too.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <!-- All of your stuff goes in here -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

Placing this on the index page gave me the ability to drag the title, excerpt and permalink from the post.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
  <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Objective one complete.  For objective two, I used the same query on the header.php page to make a dynamic nav button using the permalink.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Making The Scene</a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Objective two was complete.  Objective three was a piece of cake.  Because these are all categories, there is a page set up to display posts from those categories.  Remember, I changed the permalink structure to display section in the URL path, so in order to link to all of the Making the Scene posts, I had to add a link on the main page to http://www.hudsonmonthly.com/section/making-the-scene.  Google will love that URL, too.

Looking back on all of this, it becomes clear how you can use Wordpress to create a newspaper web site quickly and easily.  You can use categories to and the WP_Query(); function to segregate content by category on your site and manipulate it in an almost countless number of ways.  With web development being such an expensive venture, I wouldn’t be surprised if you begin to see more and more newspapers moving to Wordpress as a CMS.  These ones already have.

http://www.rockymountainindependent.com/
http://www.stabroeknews.com/
http://www.tabletmag.com/
http://www.indenvertimes.com/