The Parliament web team have launched a new News site for the new parliamentary session – and hurrah, it’s done in WordPress.
I can’t really claim any credit for actually doing any of it, despite what you may have read elsewhere. The internal development team did a considerable amount of customisation, most of which won’t be immediately visible to the reader, before I ever came along. I didn’t do a lot more than pick holes in it for a day or so.
It’s definitely a ‘news site’ rather than a blog, and the layout sits comfortably alongside the likes of the BBC. It’s a brave move to commit to putting big photos on every story, but if it’s sustainable, it’ll pay dividends. There’s a little way to go as regards the editorial; but these are early days, and the direction is unquestionably the right one.
Their plan is to make heavy use of WordPress’s fantastic RSS functionality. There’s already a very detailed subject (category) taxonomy showing on the site; and of course, once everything’s tagged, it’s relatively easy to use category-specific RSS feeds to surface the headlines on other sites. Other departments might, for example, want to integrate into their own pages a list of Parliament’s latest news on their particular topics..?
Responses
Thanks for the feedback Simon. I’ll let you know when we put the plugins we developed out there. Meanwhile, you can read a little more about what we did and why on our Labs blog.
I read about this on the labs blog first, then came here to see if by any chance you had your hand in it…
It’s a great design. Was a customisation job on an existing theme or built from scratch?
I can’t downplay my own involvement enough here. 🙂
The theme was built from scratch… presentation templates and (more interestingly) functionality plugins – to handle the resizing and inclusion of pictures, for example. I didn’t realise the plugins were going public, though… that’s fantastic news, Alistair.