TheThunderbird.ca was the publishing site for the core Multiplatform Journalism course at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and this post from December 2007 is an account of building it with almost no money or technical support — the normal condition, as it notes, for journalism educators wanting a multimedia site.
The site ran on WordPress MU, the multi-user version of the software, chosen because students could learn to post stories on it quickly. WordPress MU was described as temperamental, with some plugins simply not working on it. The harder problem was design: WordPress themes of the period looked like blogs, and the site needed something that read as a news publication and could still be customised. The choice was Brian Gardner’s Revolution News theme, at US$99 for a single site, which turned out to be adaptable with only minimal knowledge of PHP or CSS.
The rest was plugins, each solving one teaching problem. The Audio Player plugin by 1Pixelout put a customisable Flash player inside a story; the Video WordPress plugin by daburna embedded Flash video from most hosting services; Share This added social bookmarking; Shift This generated captions from an image’s alt tag; Simple Tagging handled tags on posts.
The point of the exercise was that the barrier to a working student newsroom online was no longer money or engineering. It was picking the right small pieces.