Giving a breaking-news newsroom direct control of page layouts

Challenge

Digital publishing constrained by a print-era application

The Sun publishes breaking news, sport and entertainment for a website audience that exceeded two million unique visitors a day. Its newsroom had been using a desktop application designed for print production to publish on the web. That tool was cumbersome for digital work and limited how directly editors could shape the online news experience.

Editors needed to react to developing stories by changing the homepage and section-page hierarchy in real time. The replacement also had to supply content to smartphone apps, preserve roughly ten years of publishing history and migrate more than 400,000 articles with half a terabyte of images. Advertising dependencies created a separate requirement to eliminate insecure third-party content as the site moved to HTTPS.

Solution

Flexible WordPress publishing for live news

WordPress replaced the print-oriented application with publishing tools built around the digital newsroom. Editors could log in from any device, work on stories and publish without returning to a fixed desktop production setup. Custom content types structured the site’s material, while custom XML feeds delivered that content to its smartphone apps.

A visual editor built on the WordPress Customizer let editors manipulate the homepage and section layouts directly on the frontend. They could promote and reposition coverage around a breaking story without managing each article’s placement separately in the administration interface. A migration framework converted the legacy archive into WordPress-readable data so the newsroom retained its publishing history in the new system.

The implementation combined a flexible editorial workflow with distribution to web and app audiences. Monitoring identified insecure advertising assets during development, allowing the relevant providers to update them before the site was delivered fully over encrypted connections. The result gave editors direct control over live page presentation while preserving a large archive and the feeds used beyond the website.

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