After a drawn-out design and development process, the new website for the Workers Revolutionary Party and their newspaper: The News Line is live!
It’s another WordPress website, this time I’ve used TagDiv’s Newpaper theme as a base with quite a few nice tweaks, extensions and a substantial merging of the Gallery 3 project from SourceForge and WordPress. I haven’t found a decent WordPress plugin for large photos galleries or one to embed the Gallery 3 CMS, so I just wrote my own which carefully merges the themes into one.
There’s a neat Year/Month pagination extension that helps visitors navigate the many thousands of articles in the news, features and editorial archives. Just leaving it as page 1 of 600 isn’t the best option and having the search as a fall-back is lazy.
As I know how the newspaper works (from the many years I’ve hosted their websites and the previous build in PHP-Nuke), I created a bespoke post editor plugin in WordPress that sets the scheduled time to midnight the next, clear categories, easy featured image with captions, prioritisation, auto-tagging and more.
The migration of articles, photos, from the PHP-Nuke version was an interesting task – this process kept the IDs intact so old links will properly resolve to the equivalent WordPress post ID and all tags were automatically populated using the title, content and pre-defined tags.
If you have a website that you’d like migrated from PHP-Nuke to WordPress, I would really like to hear from you. It would be great to assist some others in a similar process. Similarly, if you have questions about using Gallery 3 in WordPress, drop me a message.