The WGBH.org Development Blog

I’m happy to report that some PHP-based initiatives are still cooking! This week we launched one of those, Project Dropout.

Project Dropout is a collaboration between WGBH and our friends at WBUR looking at the student dropout crisis in Massachusetts. It includes a radio series, a television series and, if course, the blog.

The blog was built using WordPress. As I’ve previously discussed, we had to give some thought to whether to build this blog using Drupal or WordPress. We decided on WordPress for this project mainly because it’s meant to be a short lived, stand alone effort, quite distinct from WGBH.org (i.e. no shared templates or look and feel involved, no need to tightly integrate it with the rest of our main site, etc.).

Plus, by going with WordPress, much of the work (including theming) could be handled by others (both WGBH and WBUR staff) without requiring much work from Pete or I. That’s always a plus! My work involved installation and configuration and helping out with some of the trickier theming and CSS issues. All in all it’s been a smooth ride and a fun project to be involved with. Please check it out.

In other news, I’ll be attending the Intergrated Media Association’s Public Media Conference next week in Atlanta. I’ll be arriving Tuesday night so as to make the Tech Summit on Wednesday. I’ll be at the general conference as well, through Friday evening, when I return to Boston.

I’m looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new folks. If you see me wandering around, say hello! I’ll be the guy who looks kind of like this (minus the beard, which I just shaved off):

I hope to see a number of you there!

Tags: CSS, IMA, Project Dropout, Public Media Conference, WBUR, WordPress.