Case Study: IGN doubles community with flexible CMS WordPress

Summary

When IGN outgrew its homegrown content management system, they needed a CMS that would support the entire scope of the site and all its content. More importantly the CMS had to make it easy for their users to contribute content and for their editors to publish it. They found that solution in WordPress, and their blog community has doubled because of it.

Choosing a CMS with Core Features and Extensibility

“The reason we chose WordPress was based on the fact that it really is a robust and flexible content management system, and also the fact that it has a large community of developers who are continually updating it” – Jim McQuillan, Senior Software Developer, IGN.

IGN chose WordPress because it was a CMS that could go beyond a blog. They chose their extensive Blogs and Cheats sections as the first pieces to migrate off their legacy CMS, but the eventual goal will be to have the entire site running on WordPress.

“For blogs, WordPress is a pretty obvious choice. But we weren’t looking for something for only blogs, we were looking for a content management system in general because the entire company was on a legacy blog system. The bread and butter of IGN is articles, whether they are a game review or news. It’s all this content. So we’re looking to slowly over time get each of those into our new content management system, which is run by WordPress,” Jim McQuillan, Senior Software Engineer at IGN, said.

The fact that WordPress is open source was another draw, so they could easily expand on it with any custom code as needed.

“The reason we chose WordPress was based on the fact that it really is a robust and flexible content management system, and also the fact that it has a large community of developers who are continually updating it,” McQuillan said.

Getting up to speed with WordPress development

McQuillan was the only backend developer on the IGN migration project, and it was his first project of this magnitude with WordPress. He relied on the WordPress Codex and many articles written by other WordPress community members and developers for best practices, tips, and tricks.

“Before this project, I had only done some very basic development with WordPress. I spent some time studying the code base, and what WordPress could do, and what we found is that it’s flexible enough to do pretty much anything you want to do and anything else can be done through a plugin,” McQuillan said.

WordPress is an integral part of IGN’s publishing workflow. Whenever a post is published it’s posted out to IGN’s content repository, which is running on MongoDB, as well as being saved into the MySQL database. They have developed a custom frontend which renders and presents the content.

“We’ve made a bunch of customizations to WordPress, but the one great thing about WordPress is that we really didn’t have to touch the core of WordPress at all. We were able to do everything through the plugin system,” McQuillan said.

Engaging with and Empowering the IGN Community

“Oh. This is WordPress! I know WordPress, I love it!” – IGN Community members

Since IGN is a site that is powered largely by its community, they informed them in the early stages of the plans to migrate to a new blog and cheats system for their submissions. The reactions were negative, at first, but the community quickly warmed up to WordPress as the new site’s platform.

“Originally, our end users weren’t overjoyed when they heard we were changing our blog system. Everyone is resistant to change. But as soon as they saw what we were launching they said, ‘Oh. This is WordPress! I know WordPress, I love it,’ so all of the sudden everyone loved what we did,” said Jim.

WordPress powers IGN’s one-click-to-publish submission system for community members. Submissions are sent in by users, which are then reviewed by IGN editors and with a single click, they can publish them and they’ll now be live on the site. Prior to this method, an email form was used that would then have to be reformatted, edited, and entered into IGN’s CMS system manually.

“Managing our vast legacy database of video game cheat codes, hints, passwords was a daunting task. All of that is gone now. In its place is a WordPress-based system with a new submission system that streamlines this. These submissions can then be approved and published instantly, edited or deleted right from the queue,” IGN editor Samuel Claiborn said. “WordPress gives our readers tools to create better content, and it gives me the tools to edit that content and publish it all from a single place. And I’m happy to report that the obscene submissions are at an all time low (and still funny).”

IGN editors are also looking forward to the day when they can create content on WordPress, which will change once the rest of their site is migrated as well.

“For editors, it has made us bitter because we don’t use it for entering articles. For bloggers, it’s revitalized the community. The legacy system was so complicated and unintuitive, posts would get eaten for no reason, the whole thing was clunky, and only the hardcore folks used it,” said Greg Miller, Executive Editor, IGN PlayStation.

Submissions aren’t the only thing that has changed for IGN, their Blogs section is also booming.

“Part of it is IGN’s push to make a stronger community with My IGN, but the streamlined blogs have given a voice to our most casual readers. I see more blogs now than I ever did in the old system. The photos, the novels, and the quick hits. We had a blogger reporting on the tsunami from Japan, kids host their podcasts on the site — it’s a place where everyone feels like they can have a voice and have it without being hassled,” said Miller.

Growing Traffic and Ease-of-Use

Since IGN has launched the new sites, they’ve had a huge improvement in traffic. For the first five years IGN had blogs on their site, about 25,000 blogs were created. In the year since they launched with WordPress, they’ve already doubled that number, and more, and believe this is also due to the ease-of-use of WordPress.

The rest of the IGN website will be following behind, and Jim has set aside a few minutes to get WordPress ready for this new content. “To bring over the rest of the projects, it’s going to take around 10 minutes to create a new post type. The rest will be front end work and the presentation side of things. But as far as WordPress goes, it’s ready,” said McQuillan.

Want more information about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

Bangor Daily News: A complete publishing system on WordPress

Check out the inspiring and detailed story about Bangor Daily News switching to a publishing system powered by WordPress and Google Docs, on Media Bistro. There’s also a screencast which outlines their new editorial workflow and a list of all the plugins you can install to run your own news site with WordPress (emphasis ours):

The Bangor Daily News announced this week that it completed its full transition to open source blogging software, WordPress. And get this: The workflow integrates seamlessly with InDesign, meaning the paper now has one content management system for both its web and print operations. And if you’re auspicious enough, you can do it too — he’s open-sourced all the code!

Rather than having to pay a licensing fee to a company that runs your content management system, what The BDN has set up is essentially free to run. Of course, there were upfront costs involved with paying freelancers to help write the plugins, and each month the website has to pay hosting fees, but the rest of the tools they use are free for everyone. WordPress is open source software that anyone can download and use. Google Docs is also a free product if your organization is small enough. [Media Bistro]

We also had a chance to speak with William Davis, part of the Bangor Daily News team who led the integration who told us more about their decision to use WordPress:

“We looked at several solutions, including proprietary hosted solutions, but we quickly decided they wouldn’t offer the flexibility we needed. We didn’t want to have to wait around for a corporation to develop any features we needed. We wanted to be able to get into the guts of our website if we needed to,” Davis said. “We’re growing quickly online, so we wanted a platform that allowed us to develop and deploy easily and with speed.”

Through a series of plugins they developed specifically for their news site, and utilizing a few from the WordPress community, Bangor Daily News extended WordPress to do exactly what they needed it to do.

“To us, that’s the beauty of WordPress: It’s more easily extendable than any other CMS. In nine months I haven’t hacked core once except to apply patches,” said Davis.

Some of those plugins include, in Davis’ words:

• the Zoninator (written by now-Automattician Mo Jangda) that allows us to order posts in specific zones, such as the home page, instead of displaying them in reverse-chronological order. It’s a must-have for any publisher on WordPress and we’re very pleased he released it. I believe it will be available for WordPress.com VIP members soon.
• We use custom post types for quite a bit, including to power our contact pages, our events pages, our photo galleries, our our user-contributed content and our candidate pages for the election. Each of those are a separate plugin, and all will be open-sourced eventually.
• We use Terms to Links, which I built after being inspired by someone else’s plugins, to automatically link people, organizations and places to drive readers deeper into the site. Each of those are custom taxonomies.
• We use Edit Flow, a CoPress project, to handle copy flow once it gets into WordPress. It’s another must-have.
• We use Media Credit to handle attribution for images.
• We use Automattic’s own PollDaddy, with a custom plugin on top of theirs, to handle polls.

The changes to Bangor Daily News’ editorial workflow have been immediate and dramatic, but they have also seen an increase in productivity regarding their development cycle, and their site has benefited with an increase in traffic, too.

“We started rolling things out in earnest in January, and the change has been dramatic. With one workflow with WordPress at the center we’ve cut down handling times for articles dramatically — we’re now able to get the news out faster than ever before. We’ve also seen a nice jump in search engine traffic thanks to more advanced URLs. Our build times are now down dramatically, as well — we can develop or patch features as quickly as they need to be addressed. The speed at which we break news requires a nimble API to develop with, and we’ve already been able to put it to the test, to great results.”

They were also able to take advantage of WordPress’ APIs to integrate everything and even publish back to the print version in InDesign, creating a truly seamless publishing system.

“I’m proud of how deeply we’ve integrated WordPress into everything we do. Our stories start in Google Docs, where our reporters write and our editors edit. Those are seamlessly and automatically moved to WordPress when they’re ready to be published — no more copying and pasting. We also use XML-RPC to easily find and bring content onto the print page in InDesign. We custom-built an InDesign plugin to accomplish that.”

Visit Bangor Daily News

Want WordPress for your site? Get.WP.com

Agency uses Windows to run all their clients’ WordPress sites

We’re proud of the fact that WordPress is versatile and can run on many operating systems, once the minimum requirements for the software are met.

We’re going to continue to highlight interesting case studies, and this time we’re pleased to find that Microsoft did a case study with Bella Web Design, a web design and development firm who uses Windows to host all of their clients’ WordPress sites.

Check out Microsoft’s case study about Bella Web Design and how they use both WordPress and Windows to power their business, and check out Microsoft’s dedicated microsite for information about installing WordPress for Windows.

Have an interesting WordPress case study to share? Send us a note.

KQED Publishes at the Speed of News with WordPress

“Usually it takes longer to agree on a logo than it does to make a new WordPress site.” - Kevin Cooke, KQED.org

KQED Public Media, one of the largest PBS and NPR stations in the US, is probably most recognized by its public in the San Francisco Bay area as 88.5FM and by channel 9, the TV station where they watch NOVA and Frontline.

But KQED is working very hard on expanding its ever-growing web presence. In 2007, it was using WordPress for several websites in individual instances. Three years later, KQED.org has more than 15 active WordPress sites, collaborates with other regional public media outlets on WordPress plugin development, and sees a future where WordPress helps them quickly deliver the news their audience wants.

“The WordPress sites have been growing in number mainly because our users like them so much, both our editors and our end-users,” affirms Kevin Cooke, Technologist at KQED, whose first project upon arrival was migrating the single WordPress sites in WordPress MultiUser.

Open Source WordPress and Non-Profit Organizations: Win-Win

The choice of WordPress was an easy one for the organization. They looked at Movable Type and Drupal in the past but WordPress just suited their needs best, and they cited the community’s involvement and growth as a key reason for choosing it.

With just a small development team, KQED is able to take advantage of the new features that are continuously rolled out by WordPress’s community development team as well as select added functionality from the tens of thousands of plugins submitted by the entire community.

“The thousands of plugins available means we’re able to immediately adopt or build upon something from the community for a new functionality or feature. That’s why open source projects like WordPress are a good fit – we can be very effective with a small team,” says Cooke.

Since media is the driver of the news world, the ability to use several different types of embeds in their content and to customize their own media player has allowed them to rapidly follow trends and adapt the site in order to capture and diffuse the latest stories, no matter their format.

KQED has also collaborated with other public media outlets around the country on key shared WordPress plugin improvements and evolutions. They regularly share the workload of code improvements and debugging, and update each other often via email. It saves them a lot of time and money in a non-profit environment where resources are always limited.

“We’re not really reverse-engineering anything – most folks are happy to share their work, as with a recent plugin written by a colleague to support a PBS-created RSS standard. I helped him debug the plugin in the WP 3.0 environment and in doing so helped the plugin work better for everyone,” says Cooke.

KQED uses WordPress’s built-in RSS functionality to be the glue between the various pieces of its websites, integrating them seamlessly and dynamically. “Every tag, every category, and every blog automatically has RSS feeds built-in that have proven really handy in sharing our content not only with our partners, but within our site and its various technologies (Java, Ruby on Rails, other php apps),” explains Cooke.

Sites from Idea to Online in Record Time

The most measurable success factor for KQED with WordPress is the speed to market from idea to online. The most recent site launched on KQED.org built with WordPress is News Fix, which they debuted just a few weeks before the November 2010 election night. The site saw record traffic and continues to report Northern California news and serve up live blogging for events such as the Giants World Series Victory parade.

“News Fix served a pretty crucial role in our coverage. The site was seen in the newsroom as a very good outlet for rapidly extending our news coverage beyond our radio newscasts,” explains Cooke.

When planning a site in such a short time frame, KQED takes advantage of the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten, as a base theme and adds site-specific customizations through child themes and widgets. It allows them to immediately provide a stable theme code base that can be customized by the individual site without having to start from zero, and reduces their maintenance on multiple themes’ upkeep.

“We’ve enjoyed WordPress not only for the ability to handle traffic as our sites grow, but also it gives us the ability to move quickly. Usually it takes longer to agree on a logo than it does to make a new WordPress site,” says Cooke.

KQED Editors Love Publishing with WordPress

As the news world continues to change, KQED’s success as a news organization is determined by their ability to move quickly, and WordPress keeps them agile, and publishing early and often.

A large part of this success comes from user adoption, and is due to the WordPress administration interface’s usability and how easy it is to learn. “In terms of user adoption, choosing WordPress was a no-brainer as it’s really simple, and a lot of our editors are already familiar with it. The editorial tools WordPress uses are easier to use than some of the tools we’ve developed internally,” says Cooke.

Extensive guides and instructions are available through the WordPress Codex and thousands of published WordPress how-to articles across the Internet add up to a dynamic reference guide that can be used as a base to educate editors on the WordPress interface and its features, but often KQED editors are teaching amongst themselves. “My favorite aspect of WordPress is that it’s very easy to use,” confirms QUEST site editor, Jenny Oh. “It usually takes me 20 minutes to introduce new users to WordPress, and several individuals were able to pick it up with just written instructions.”

KQED has more sites using WordPress planned for the near future and they intend to take advantage of some features released in WordPress 3.0, like custom post types. “We’ve got a site planned that will take advantage of the custom post types and taxonomies, and we can’t wait to share it,” shares Cooke.

Visit KQED.org and their WordPress sites at http://www.kqed.org/community/blogs

Mike Pratt on BuddyPress – Social Networking in a Box

At a recent Dallas Fort Worth WordPress meetup, Mike Pratt gave a presentation on how he’s using WordPress and BuddyPress to build his very own social network:

… there are a ton of excellent needs and reasons to use BuddyPress to take your site and turn it into the community it is begging to become. That’s the killer point: there needs to be a community underlying all of this. Maybe your focused on gardeners in Texas or stamp collectors in Des Moines or people around the world dealing with Cystic Fibrosis – if you have a community in mind then BuddyPress is an amazing tool because you can shape the community according to you/its needs. Take that Facebook (or Ning)!

The slides and the full video from the presentation and more of his thoughts are available at mikepratt.tv

PixoPoint: WordPress.com For a Full Site

Really interesting case study posted by Ryan Hellyer of PixoPoint on how his firm, using CSS and a couple of upgrades, built a full site on WordPress.com for the Red Devils of the New Zealand Ice Hockey League:

Ryan described the initial scope:

Their original site consisted of hard coded .html files as a simple static site. Our initial suggestion of a full-custom designed and coded, hosted WordPress installation was beyond their budget, so we suggested an alternative which has slashed their costs considerably yet allowed them to create their own WordPress powered site with a design which matches their branding and includes all of the functionality they requested, including a contact form, email subscriptions for news posts, no commenting functionality (they didn’t want a traditional blog) and the ability to add photo galleries and videos

Conclusion:

Traditionally WordPress.com has only been suggested as a low-budget option for those who can’t afford to upgrade to “proper” hosted setup, however for the Red Devils, we were able to meet all of their requirements without losing anything that they required in their site. We were also able to integrate their teams branding into an existing theme very quickly through some simple CSS upgrades.

[ Read the full case study on PixoPoint.com ]

How-to: Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress

From Harvard Law’s Dan Collis-Puro, a how-to on optimizing your WordPress MU install, using Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress:

We put an nginx caching proxy server in front of our wordpress mu install and sped it up dramatically – in some cases a thousandfold. I’ve packaged up a plugin, along with installation instructions here – WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator.

You can read the full details on Dan’s blog and grab the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

[ Visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/djcp ]

WordPress as a CMS Case Study: WNET.org

Back in July we posted about the remarkable project that WNET (PBS of NYC) put together with Tierra to launch 50 sites in ten months using one CMS, WordPress.

Dan Goldman and Jamie Trowbridge who headed up that project, were kind enough to present a case study of how it was all done, at the recent WordCamp NYC:

Dan Goldman and Jamie Trowbridge: WNET.org Case Study

►