There’s a good story over at Journalism.co.uk on the Washington Post redesign (“New WaPo ‘flexible’ homepage completes site redesign“).
Here’s a quote that stands out:
If you’re going to be quicker, agile and innovative, you can’t be in a place where it takes you six months to build something.
I’d agree with that, and I’d add that it’s risky to have any lengthy period of uninterrupted development. Even one month is a long time, particularly for a small team where time is so precious. Big projects need lots of work – but it’s not just about completing the task, it’s about doing it right. Even with perfect project management (is anyone perfect?) it’s surely better to spend between a few days and a couple of weeks building core functionality, and giving the primary user(s) an early demo to see if you’re on the right track.
In terms of the platform that the Washington Post uses:
The publishing process on the outlet’s website is now entirely powered by Arc, a collaborative tool developed by engineers and journalists
…
The Post uses WordPress for 70 per cent of the content it produces – Arc integrates through APIs with WordPress and other platforms, such as the Washington Post recipe or quiz database.
Emphasis mine. If WordPress still powers a large part of the process, then it’s not entirely powered by Arc. It sounds like WordPress is largely used for the back-end CMS with some custom tools added onto it, while the front-end of the site is entirely bespoke.
If that’s the case, then that makes a lot of sense – mainly because I think it’s far better to build a theme in Twig than in pure PHP.
Based on this assumption, I’ve updated my CMS usage chart to include the Washington Post.