The problem
Corso Italia News is an online magazine of news and culture for Campania, with sections for Naples, Salerno, Caserta, Avellino and Benevento. It is a live paper with an archive of more than 11,800 articles. Over the years the homepage had drifted: blocks showed stories from 2013 and 2015 next to today’s news, many sections had no place in the menu, and every article had to be shared on Facebook by hand. The editors also asked for a fresh, cleaner design.
What I built
A set of focused fixes on the live site, and a new theme prepared on a separate staging copy.
- Homepage audit: I checked every block of the page builder and found that about 13 of the 15 were not sorted newest first. I documented each one and how to fix it while keeping its category.
- Second section bar: a small plugin that adds a second menu bar under the main one, so all the sections fit without touching the theme.
- Automatic Facebook posts: a plugin that posts every new article, with its image, to the paper’s Facebook page through the Meta Graph API. It has a settings panel, a message template with title, excerpt and link, and a step-by-step guide for creating the Meta app.
- New theme, Corso Italia News 2026: a custom theme with a large featured story and three side cards, then latest news, in-depth pieces and video. The sidebar has most read, newsletter sign-up and a promo box, and there is a dark footer.
- Live weather: the header shows the weather through Open-Meteo, which needs no API key. The city is set in the Customizer.
- Reader forms: a redesigned “send us a story” form, a newsletter form and a contact form.
Built with
WordPress, the Newsmag theme with the tagDiv page builder on the live site, a custom theme for the redesign, Contact Form 7, the Meta Graph API, Open-Meteo, Google Fonts (Playfair Display and Inter) and WP-CLI scripts for repeatable changes.
Why it was done this way
The client asked for the new design straight on the live site. I built it on staging instead and wrote a go-live checklist. With more than 11,800 articles, a redesign done live could break search rankings, links shared on Facebook and Google, RSS feeds and past newsletters.
