Inside BlackBerry was the umbrella publication for BlackBerry®’s public blog network, the front door above the Business, Developer, and Help blogs that ran in parallel underneath. From a desk an hour up the QEW from BlackBerry’s Waterloo headquarters, I worked on the WordPress® VIP theme that powered all four properties from a single codebase.
Archived capture (June 2016, mid-life): view blogs.blackberry.com on the Wayback Machine. Earliest WP VIP era capture: April 2011.
The property
blogs.blackberry.com routed readers across four sub-properties — Inside, Business, Developer, and Help — each with its own audience but a shared editorial voice. The hub carried headline announcements, product launches, and cross-cutting stories; sub-blogs carried the depth. Cross-blog navigation lived in a top strip on every page, colour-coded per surface.
The work
Two engagements bracketed the WordPress VIP era. In 2011, the four BlackBerry blogs migrated off self-hosted WordPress onto WordPress.com VIP, each running its own custom theme — vip/rimblogs, vip/rimbizblog, vip/rimdevblog, vip/rimhelpblog. The rim prefix is a fingerprint of the pre-rebrand corporate identity; the WordPress.com backend subdomains kept the RIM naming through the entire VIP era, even after the January 2013 corporate rebrand to BlackBerry.
In 2013 the four custom themes were retired and replaced with a single mobile-responsive codebase, vip/blackberry-blogs, that powered all four properties from one source. Per-blog identity was handled through colour classes, logo variants, and per-surface favicons rather than separate theme directories. The unified theme deployed in October 2013 and ran until the network was decommissioned in March 2019.
- Theme development across all four properties (2011 and 2013 engagements)
- Migrations from per-blog custom themes to a single shared codebase
- Mobile-first redesign of the four-property estate
- Work performed under the WordPress VIP code-review gate
Platform context
WordPress VIP is the enterprise tier of WordPress.com — the platform that backed properties like the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Spotify Newsroom — with mandatory code review, performance constraints, and a published list of disallowed PHP. BlackBerry’s Waterloo, Ontario headquarters sat at the centre of Canada’s tech corridor; the four-blog estate served a global readership from that base. The unified theme reduced four parallel codebases to one. It is a maintenance pattern I still recommend for media estates running sub-brands on WordPress.
The four-blog estate
- Inside BlackBerry for Business — the B2B-facing publication for enterprise mobility buyers and channel partners.
- BlackBerry Developer Blog — the dev-rel surface for SDK release notes, API guidance, and code samples.
- BlackBerry Help Blog — the support-content surface for troubleshooting and software-update guidance.
What it’s running on now
BlackBerry’s blog estate has since been rebuilt off WordPress VIP — blogs.blackberry.com now redirects to a Next.js property at blackberry.com. Captures from the WordPress VIP era are preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
This work maps cleanly today to enterprise WordPress estates serving multiple editorial audiences from a single code surface. See also my work on o.canada.com, another Canadian WordPress VIP property from the same era.