Building a news site for the connection you actually have
A news article shouldn't need a good internet connection to be useful. I worked on a text-first publishing feature that gives readers the story with less to download.
Most of us build on fast connections. The person reading the story might be on a metered plan, a patchy mobile network, or looking for updates during an emergency. A page full of images and scripts gets in the way of what they came for.
What it does
The feature gives a WordPress site a text-first version of itself, under a route
like /lite/. Readers get an archive and individual articles, built from the
content the newsroom already publishes. Nobody has to post a story twice.
My initial implementation set up those routes and templates, the text rendering, image placeholders, liveblog support, and the React admin screens.
Headings, paragraphs, lists, links, and basic emphasis stay. Each image becomes a placeholder with its description, and the reader decides whether to load it. The words come first.
The settings side
The public page is simple on purpose, but newsrooms don't all work the same way. I built settings for the URL base, pagination, category and tag filters, external link behavior, and appearance. There's also an RSS import, so stories from another feed can become posts on the site.
The aim was that an editor could change any of this without knowing how the routing or rendering works.
Getting links right
External links took more thought than I expected. Readers should know when they're leaving the light version, the URL has to stay correct, and the publisher's new-tab setting has to carry through. None of that shows up in a screenshot, but get it wrong and the site is harder to use.
What I liked about this project is that most decisions had a simple test: does this help someone on a bad connection read the story?