The problem
Cosenza Post is an online daily paper for the province of Cosenza. It publishes many kinds of content: breaking news, politics, sport, university life, press releases and opinion columns. Much of its video lived on Facebook pages. The paper needed a homepage that fills itself section by section, a place for video, and room for outside writers.
What I built
A custom WordPress theme and a small network of sites around it.
- Homepage made of section blocks: 8 blocks, each fed by its own category: News, Politics, Crime, Sport, Unical (the local university), Citizens’ Rights, Press Releases and an opinion column. Editors only pick a category; the homepage updates by itself.
- Web TV page: a page template that uses the Facebook Graph SDK to show the latest 12 videos from the paper’s Facebook page, so video published on Facebook also appears on the site.
- Video from partner pages: the homepage pulls the newest video from 4 Facebook pages in a single batch request, which keeps the page fast.
- Authors’ network: a WordPress multisite on a separate subdomain where contributors run their own blogs, plus a stand-alone blog for one columnist.
- Google News sitemap: a dedicated news sitemap so new articles are picked up quickly.
- Football coverage: SportsPress for fixtures and tables, plus results and standings pages for the local team’s fan section.
Built with
WordPress, a custom theme based on Underscores, the Facebook Graph SDK installed with Composer, WordPress Multisite for the authors’ blogs, SportsPress, ShareThis, WP Embed Facebook and Akismet.
Why it was done this way
The Cosenza Post theme shares its code base with the theme of Montalto Uffugo Online, its local supplement. Building the newspaper theme once and reusing it meant both papers got the same section blocks and the same Facebook video tools, with one set of code to maintain.
