Yesterday evening All Things Digital, a new home for Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and John Paczkowski was unleashed on the internet.
I’ve been working on this for the past month and a half, and it’s been a real whirlwind project. When we got the contract to build the site using WordPress, we were warned that it was an aggressive build schedule.
It was.
And that was before the inevitable scope creep. 
Luckily there all-star team was in place to make it all happen. In particular the people at Mule Design who created the design and the initial XHTML/CSS template for the site (which are both top notch), Adam Tow who worked on the build portion of the project with me (and really did an outstanding job), Brian Oberkirch who can herd cats with the best of them, the great folks at Automattic who are hosting the site, Raanan Bar-Cohen, Beth Callaghan and the Dow Jones and WSJ teams, and last but certainly not least, the site principals. I really can’t say enough good things about these folks; if any of them hadn’t executed at the highest level, there is no way the site would be live right now.
During the requirements gathering portion of the project, I was very pleased when they asked explicitly for us to implement “Om’s Share This” plugin. Of course, Om’s plugin is actually my plugin - it’s great to see the plugin and the icon getting traction in such high profile sites.
For those of you who are interested in the technical details, here’s a little high-level about the build itself.
The site is running a single instance of WordPress Multi-User (WPMU), the same software that powers wordpress.com. It is running on several machines, but I’m happy to say I don’t know many of the server configuration details. Barry took care of all of that for us.
All Things Digital isn’t your typical WPMU site. Instead of many separate blogs, we have a single site with lots and lots of content. Yes there are a couple of traditional blogs, but there are also imported WSJ columns (complete with archives), video all over the place, and there is little sense of each blog being a unique site. Quite the opposite, we often pull content from 3 or 4 “blogs”1 into a single page. You don’t see that happening a lot on a standard wordpress.com blog.
We actually vacillated a little between using WPMU and a single user WordPress (WPSU) installation. It’s easier to access data globally from a WPSU installation, but creating the appearance of multiple blogs (like I do on this site) requires some complicated category manipulation, and it doesn’t have separate admin interfaces for each “blog”, which is helpful when you have multiple authors each working on their own individual content. When we made the choice to go with WPMU we weren’t sure if we were making the right decision, but with the benefit of hindsight I’m quite confident we made the right choice.
I’m not sure how often WPMU has been used in this manner (pulling content from multiple blogs for a single site) in the past, but I do know that it will be a lot easier in the future. Donncha did some great optimizations to make it faster to access content from other “blogs” in WPMU while we were building out the site. Thanks to the beauty of open source, everyone benefits.
The fact we were able to do all of our extensive customizations in themes and plugins is a testament to WordPress’s flexibility (and to Adam’s and my creativity 
). No core changes means easy upgrades and maintenance - always a good thing.
This was a fun and challenging site to build, and there are plenty more great ideas planned for the future. I look forward to watching the great content pour in from Walt, Kara, John and the guest bloggers.
- I’m using ‘blog’ as a general term to refer to both the blogs and columns on the site, since they are stored in the database in the same way. [back]
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jenz adds this Comment:
Once again, nice work!
April 26th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Live: All Things Digital at Like It Matters adds this Pingback:
[…] Alex has a great note about technical considerations involved in the project. I particularly like this part of his post: We actually vacillated a […]
April 26th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
tony conrad adds this Comment:
Hey Alex - Awesome job on the site. Glad to see your icon getting more use :). Here is my post -http://sphere.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/all-things-d-in-the-sphere/
April 26th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Thanks to you, Martin and your team for all the help getting Sphere running so nicely on the site!
April 26th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Scott adds this Comment:
I see a eroded footprint of the Sandbox in there.
Well done, Alex. It’s quite an attractive site. Headshots aren’t done easily, and there they look really sharp. [Tips hat]
April 26th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Tobias adds this Comment:
Yeah, this is the biggest single issue I have with WP apart from the admin interface - I don’t know why no one seems to see that having different and separate kinds of content containers isn’t something out of the ordinary for many sites. And it falls right between the cracks of WP categories and WPMU. And I love the EE philosophy you’re using in your footnote. I wish I would have had your ideas as a reference when I recently ported an MT multiblog installation… GO WP multiblogs! Maybe the summer of code CMS feature project will help in this respect…
April 26th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
tecosystems » links for 2007-04-27 adds this Pingback:
[…] All Things Digital | alexking.org more detail from Alex as to what went into All Things D (tags: AlexKing AllthingsD WordPress WaltMossberg) […]
April 26th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
All Things Digital launches | Eric Cheng’s Journal adds this Pingback:
[…] to Alex King and Adam Tow, who have just launched All Things Digital, the online home for Walt Mossberg, Kara […]
April 27th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Frihetens vingar » Blog Archive » All things Digital slÃ¥r mig i att använda Wordpress adds this Pingback:
[…] Uppdatering: Gustav tipsade om att det var Alex King som lÃ¥g bakom och att han hade skrivit ett inlägg om hur de hade skapat All things digital. […]
April 30th, 2007 at 1:51 am
Walt, WSJ, WordPress, etc. « Changing Way adds this Pingback:
[…] Alex King posted about setting up the site, and about the people and software involved. The main software is WordPress Multi-User. I should therefore add it to the list of WPMU sites I maintain in the sidebar of one of my other blogs. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 7:40 am
Ryan adds this Comment:
Great article as always Alex. Any chance you’ll be talking more in-depth about how you implemented the details similar to your articles detailing the current alexking.org?
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:31 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Ryan - probably not, I don’t have the freedom to talk about projects done for others as I do on my own projects.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 am
WordPress Wednesday News: Almost 1 Million WordPress.com Blogs, Over 4 Million Themes Downloaded, and You Want More News? at The Blog Herald adds this Pingback:
[…] Design Behind All Things Digital Explained: Alex King explains the design and development behind All Things Digital, one of the newest additions to the WordPress.com VIP hosting […]
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Secret Weapon Notes: The Engaged Edition at Secret Weapon Labs adds this Pingback:
[…] Alex King has been part of the creation of a new site entitled “All Things Digital” published by writers at the Wall Street Journal - most notably Walt Mossberg. It’s nice to see such a great name both blogging and on the WordPress platform. Kudos to Alex for some nice work as well… […]
May 8th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Introducing Eric Miller | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[…] King Design does - particularly custom WordPress development. There is a lot of great stuff being built on WordPress these days, and I’m looking forward to King Design being able to take on more of these […]
May 21st, 2007 at 10:58 am
The Gray Lady has a new spring in her step: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site « The Wayward Word Press adds this Pingback:
[…] helped create “All Things Digital?” Alex King, that’s who. See Alex’s post All Things Digital. If you want to learn more about Alex you should visit his business site, Crowd […]
September 18th, 2007 at 10:01 am