The WGBH.org Development Blog

Hello world, indeed!

Welcome to the grand opening of the WGBH.org Development Blog! We’re glad you could join us. Pull up a chair and get comfy.

WGBH is a public media broadcaster in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as a producer of content for the public broadcasting system (PBS). As we like to say WGBH produces content that informs, inspires and entertains. Read more about what WGBH is all about here.

WGBH.org is the web site which supports and enhances all that WGBH does, by featuring TV and radio program information, live radio streaming, podcasts, video clips, news, community events and lots of other interesting and original content. Perhaps you’ve seen it already…

We’re the folks primarily responsible for the technical development the site and the content management systems that are used to populate it. Read more about who we are here.

WGBH.org is a complex site with lots going on behind the scenes; it’s also about to undergo a major redesign, including a completely new information architecture and back end infrastructure. In honor of this impending overhaul we’ve decided to launch this blog to share, from a technical perspective, how we’re going to do it. Since we’re a public media company and since we’re going to rely on (mostly) open source tools to do this work (e.g. MySQL, Drupal) and since we’re not doing anything top secret we thought blogging about the process in an open way only made sense. We plan to share what we know and hope to learn from you what know and are willing to share with us.

Be aware that the content of this blog will be pretty nerdly in nature, as it’s aimed at web developers, site architects and assorted IT folks. As such we’ll make heavy use of such terms as HTML, PHP, MySQL, CSS, XML, RSS, SQL, bandwidth, capacity, servers, loads and other such dorky acronyms and buzzwords. However, we promise to never, ever use the word synergy. Whoops, well never, ever starting right … now!

This should be enough to get us started. In the coming days I’ll provide some more background on the current site and the plans for the rebuild.