BlackBerry®’s Developer Blog was the dev-rel surface in the WordPress® VIP estate — code samples, SDK release notes, API guidance, conference recaps for an audience writing software for BlackBerry devices. I worked on the theme that powered it through the 2011 VIP migration and the 2013 unified-theme rebuild.
Archived capture (June 2016, mid-life): view devblog.blackberry.com on the Wayback Machine. Earliest WP VIP era capture: June 2011.
The property
devblog.blackberry.com — Twitter @blackberrydev, YouTube BlackBerryDev, RSS routed through a Canadian-CDN Feedburner endpoint — was the most peer-credible of the four properties. Posts carried syntax-highlighted code, embedded videos, downloadable SDK assets, and bylines from the dev-rel team. The audience was working developers, not the press.
The work
devblog ran on vip/rimdevblog from June 2011 — the longest self-hosted WordPress phase of any of the four blogs, migrated last in the first VIP wave. The October 2013 redesign retired vip/rimdevblog and folded the developer blog onto the shared vip/blackberry-blogs codebase. Per-surface identity stayed (the green dev colour treatment, logo-header-dev.gif, favicon-dev.ico) but the underlying theme was now one of four sibling brands inside a single codebase.
- Theme development across the developer-facing surface
- 2011 migration off self-hosted WordPress, then 2013 redesign onto the shared codebase
- Code-block, syntax-highlighting, and downloadable-asset patterns treated as first-class content types
- Built and shipped under the WordPress VIP review gate
Platform context
Dev-rel content has different theme requirements than marketing content — code escaping, copyable snippets, version-tagged posts, working-with-this-SDK navigation patterns. Building those affordances inside the WordPress VIP environment, where every commit went through code review, kept the developer blog’s pace honest. BlackBerry’s Waterloo dev-rel team wrote and shipped on the same theme that drove the rest of the estate.
What it’s running on now
devblog.blackberry.com now 301-redirects to BlackBerry’s current developer-solution blog inside the corporate site, rebuilt off WordPress. The WP VIP property went 301 on March 30, 2019 — the last Wayback captures from March 2019 show the unified theme still in production days before the cutover. Captures preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Sibling properties in the same WordPress VIP estate: the Inside BlackBerry hub, the Business Blog, and the Help Blog.
Maps to WordPress development work for organizations whose blog is actually a technical surface — dev-rel, docs-adjacent, SDK release notes — not just a marketing channel.