Websites/Press-Center-Consolidation/Development
What We're Building
The new Mozilla Press Center will be a single WordPress website with some fairly heavy customization. It will be hosted as part of the blog.mozilla.com network (a WordPress multisite installation) and the customization is handled by the theme itself and with additional plugins. The design will blend seamlessly with the rest of mozilla.org and will closely match the current Press Center pages (mozilla.org/en-US/press). The intent is that the new WP-powered press center will be almost indistinguishable from the current, hand-coded press center.
Hosting and Serving
Though the content will be managed via WordPress, we don't wish to inroduce WP to the technology stack that powers the rest of the mozilla.com/org domain (WP is an extremely popular platform and thus a common target for hackers, so we want to keep it isolated in the event of disaster). Furthermore, WP sites are fully dynamic by nature, with every pageload requiring some database queries that can be costly in terms of performance. Serving static pages that don't involve hitting a database is much lighter and more responsive under heavy traffic.
We'll solve both of these problems at once by hosting the original content offsite at the blog.mozilla.com subdomain (probably blog.mozilla.com/press) and parsing the output to generate static copies that will be hosted at mozilla.org/press. In effect, the official Press Center section of mozilla.org will be a static mirror of the dynamic WP-powered Press Center hosted elsewhere, updated at regular intervals to automatically fetch new content.
Site Structure
- Press Center landing page - a standard blog where posts may be entered directly or syndicated from other blogs.
- Mozilla At a Glance - a single page where each item in the "accordion" is a separate entry (using WP custom post types).
- Media Library - a set of static WP Pages that can be easily edited and maintained. Most images can be uploaded and managed through WP. Especially large files (high-res posters, videos) may need to be posted by different means.
- Firefox Press Kits - a simple set of static WP Pages.
- Speaker Bios - each bio is a custom post and the headshots are uploaded and managed through WP.
- Speaker Request Form - a one-off, standalone page that won't be managed by WP.
Other Features
- There are multiple widget-enabled sidebar areas where editors can easily customize blocks of content.
- Some navigation will be customizable WP menus so editors can add/remove/modify navigation as needed.
- Different users will have different levels of access, with lower-level users being more restricted in what they can modify. See WordPress Roles and Capabilities.
- Several user roles are predefined out of the box, but we can also create custom roles with any specific set of capabilities we want to grant them (if one of the prefab roles doesn't fit).
l10n
- We'll be using WPML to manage localizing content in WordPress.
- Some parts of the UI that aren't dynamic (header, footer, main navigation, etc) can be localized the old fashioned way with .mo files for each locale.