Inside BlackBerry for Business was the B2B-facing voice in BlackBerry®’s WordPress® VIP estate, the surface that spoke to enterprise mobility buyers, channel partners, and IT decision-makers. From an hour up the QEW from BlackBerry’s Waterloo headquarters, I worked on the theme that powered it through both the 2011 VIP migration and the 2013 unified-theme rebuild.
Archived capture (May 2016, mid-life): view bizblog.blackberry.com on the Wayback Machine. Earliest WP VIP era capture: April 2011.
The property
bizblog.blackberry.com — Twitter handle @blackberry4biz — carried business-audience content: enterprise mobility, BES updates, channel-partner programs, IR-adjacent stories. Editorial cadence skewed steadier and longer-form than the consumer-facing Inside blog. Subscribers fed in via a Feedburner pipeline (InsideBlackberryForBusinessBlog) that long outlived its parent.
The work
The bizblog ran on vip/rimbizblog from the 2011 self-hosted-to-VIP migration through October 2013. The 2013 redesign retired that custom theme and migrated bizblog onto the unified vip/blackberry-blogs codebase shared with Inside, Developer, and Help. Per-property identity — the logo-header-biz.gif wordmark, the teal accent, the favicon-biz.ico — was layered onto the shared theme through colour classes and asset variants.
- 2011 self-hosted to VIP migration
- 2013 mobile-first rebuild on the shared
vip/blackberry-blogscodebase - B2B-audience editorial workflow handled inside WordPress’s built-in roles, not bolted on
- WordPress VIP code-review gate on every theme commit
Platform context
WordPress VIP underwrites a different content-ops contract than self-hosted WordPress: nothing ships without code review, the disallowed-PHP list rules out a long tail of common WordPress patterns, and the platform absorbs the infrastructure cost in exchange for that discipline. For a B2B publication tied to BlackBerry’s Waterloo mothership, that trade made sense. Predictable uptime mattered more than bespoke plugin freedom.
What it’s running on now
bizblog.blackberry.com 301-redirects today to BlackBerry’s current insights blog, rebuilt off WordPress VIP. The original property held on longer than the others — Wayback shows a clean 200 response as late as January 2020, roughly a year after Inside, Developer, and Help went 301. Captures preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Sibling properties in the same WordPress VIP estate: the Inside BlackBerry hub, the Developer Blog, and the Help Blog.
Same shape as my WordPress development practice today: enterprise B2B publications where editorial workflow and platform discipline outrank novelty.
