Offered to nonprofits: WNET’s WordPress variant used to redo ‘50 sites in 10 months’

New York’s WNET.org and Brooklyn’s Tierra Innovation Inc. announced last week they’re making available to other nonprofits a content management system based on the open-source WordPress Multi-User blogging platform. WNET said the CMS enabled it redo 5 to 10 websites a month instead of one or two without the CMS, at a quarter of the cost.

Efficiency was necessary because the station had to do 16 national program sites and 27 sites related to the sister stations WNET and WLIW. With the redesign and its big doses of on-demand video, WNET sites have more than doubled their usage.

The partners published a paper discussing why they chose WordPress to build upon and what features they needed to add. For series sites such as Nature’s, each episode gets a blog post, but the team devised a new Collections plugin that groups other material related to the episode. They also gave WordPress MU the ability to handle sites with various structures under various domains, including PBS.org.

Tierra also updated another WordPress plugin that enables a web publisher to trace misbehaving components that slow down site operations.