WordCamp NYC 2009 – WNET.org case study

by Alin Wagner-lahmy on November 14, 2009 · 3 comments

: Image via Wikipedia

I am live blogging from WordCamp NYC, please excuse any typos or less polished text.

First session is case study for using WorPress as CMS. “Using WPMU [Wordpress Multiple Users - AWL] , WNET partnered with Tierra to launch 50+ non-blog sites supporting WNET television programming, reducing costs, improving traffic and streamlining their production across multiple Thirteen and PBS teams. ”

Speakers: Dan Goldman, Jamie Trowbridge.

Problem WNET wanted to solved is twofold: 1) create and support multiple sites, refreshing dormant ones, with differnt design, different architecture, and time consuming effort to support all of these. 2) shift effort of resource from launching, to maintaining Dan Goldman:

“I wanted a way to consolidate all we done to single user experience … I wanted a way to enforcing function, get all methods and processes and design paradigms to converge, reduce the amount of effort that went into amount of effort into design and launch, and solve maintenance. I wanted to build an audience, not just desgin a site“.

Solution: was looking for a centralized CMS, make web publishing easier. Wordpress was just an easy and accessible solution. “The process begins with launch rather than ending with launch” .

How?

Heavy standardization effort – of file formats. first stripped all non unique content and then grab unique code and started organizing and categorizing unique content.
Migration content dump into WP posts and pages (legacy hand coded, dreamweavered content)
Pick a Theme and cascade it across the site: common architecture, visual design that will support any TV show as well as non Tv-show content.
Design templates that can support multiple brands
Content strategy: pushing related content into different main sections of the sites.
Heavy plugin support: Created a promo player plugin to which editors could push images, text, flash etc and that could be surfaced on different pages.

Implementation – Use of Templates: 2 families of templates: horizontal or vertical, each to bucket different TV content. Aggregation websites used the vertical template and TV shows pages used horizontal template. How does that translate into “Lets make each episode a blog” top level aggregator of episodes is a vertical blog page.

Used plugin that allows you to map multiple domain to single install of wordpress.

End Result:

Before CMS: 8-12 weeks to launch a site, $25,000 – $40,000 cost.

After CMS: 1-2 weeks to launch a site, $5,000 cost

Check out www.tierra-innovation.com/wordpress-cms for toolkit, “as part of commitment to sharing our work with other organization and the wordpress development community”