In 2011-2012, when Postmedia moved its network of daily newspapers onto WordPress, the Montreal Gazette landed on WordPress VIP — at the time, one of a small handful of major Canadian news properties on the platform. WP VIP in that era was not a commodity purchase: onboarding required direct vetting from Automattic’s VIP team and a codebase review before the first deploy. For an English daily publishing in Montreal, that platform foundation made a stack of bilingual-discovery problems tractable that would otherwise have stayed messy.
Publishing an English daily in Montreal is a different SEO and content-discovery problem than publishing one anywhere else in the country. The Gazette’s reader is searching in both languages. Neighbourhood names, politicians, institutions, streets — every one has a French canonical form and an English working form, and readers move freely between them. The theme engineering had to let an English-language template live comfortably in a search environment that is bilingual whether the publisher likes it or not.
That meant being deliberate about a few things the rest of the network didn’t have to think about as carefully — language metadata in the head, taxonomy slug decisions for place names, the way headlines and meta descriptions referenced bilingual proper nouns, internal linking that handled the same entity referenced under two names depending on the writer. The Gazette ran as its own child theme on the shared Postmedia parent; the parent carried infrastructure and performance, and the Gazette’s child carried the bilingual considerations as first-class concerns instead of bolt-ons.
None of it is exotic engineering. All of it compounds. The bilingual-discovery thinking from this build is one I still apply to any publisher operating across language lines.
