Tierra Lab
Fifty sites. Ten months. One CMS.
Tierra customized WordPress as a CMS to make Online Publishing
more Efficient.
During the past year Tierra and WNET.ORG (PBS Channel Thirteen in New York) collaborated on a groundbreaking project that cut WNET.ORG’s costs, streamlined their web publishing process and improved the user experience on many of their individual program sites. At the heart of our solution was WordPress Multi-User, an open source blogging platform.
Publishing a dynamic website with frequent content updates is a must for many businesses these days. But this is easier said than done. There are a multitude of considerations, technical hurdles and business or marketing objectives that play into every website project. If you’ve ever created or managed a relatively complex website, you know what I mean. Now imagine that times 50.
That’s basically the challenge that WNET.ORG (PBS Channel Thirteen in New York) brought to Tierra this past year: Design and build a website platform that can scale to support the dozens of websites that WNET creates and publishes every year. And provide a single content management system (CMS) that lets anyone—from the most competent programmer to the most technically averse writer or editor—easily log in and publish on any one of those sites with very little support.
Tierra helped lay the foundation for a significantly streamlined publishing operation for WNET’s interactive group, from a careful discovery of technical platforms and design requirements, to information architecture, to migrating a decade’s worth of web content, to finally customizing WordPress Multi-User as a CMS. The new platform and tools let WNET.ORG focus on their core competency: creating innovative and compelling educational content to support its on-air programming and extending it across the web.
The case study below describes in detail what WNET.ORG and Tierra accomplished with the project, how we went about it, and what the benefits have been for our client. We also discuss how we customized WordPress Multi-User and some unique contributions we’ve made to this leading open-source software platform. We welcome your feedback and would be delighted to discuss our work with you.
Download the Case Study (PDF 2.6 MB)
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10 Responses to “Fifty sites. Ten months. One CMS.”
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July 16th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
[...] Visit WNET.ORG & Tierra Innovation ] Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Poker Players Alliance Powered by WordPress [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Nice blog, cool design, will bookmark
September 17th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Has the multi site plugin been released?
September 17th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
For WNET.org, we used http://wpmudev.org/project/Multi-Site-Manager for the Multi-Site manager and modified it to fit the environment.
September 17th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
@Todd: Thanks. I’ll take a look. Also, we’re using WPMU to power our church web site. As we work through sermon series, we post a new ‘episode’ of the teaching each week. I think our setup is similar enough to TV episodes that we could really benefit from the Collections plugin. Has that been made available as well?
September 18th, 2009 at 10:39 am
We’ll be adding the collections plugin to the general WordPress population in the next month or so, once we simplify it slightly so it can serve more functions. We’ll be opening a CMS Toolkit web site soon that will have many of the WNET.org plugins. Keep checking back on an announcement for that.
September 18th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Good to hear. I’ve added this blog to my reader. Thanks for sharing!
November 15th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Hey Todd,
I’m starting work on migrating the church web site to WordPress. I’ve been looking for other plugins to accomplish the functionality of the Collections plugin as it’s apparently not released yet; but haven’t been able to find a good alternative. Just thought I’d check to see if maybed it’s been released and I missed it?
November 15th, 2009 at 8:51 am
The collections plugin is in the process of being generalized for non-WNET sites, so please stay tuned…We’ll post an announcement when its ready.
Thanks for your interest.
November 19th, 2009 at 7:22 am
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