Vancouver is one of the few markets in Canada where two daily papers in the same building have to read like two different papers. The same publisher, the same city, the same upstream codebase — and a reader who can tell within a glance which one they picked up.
That was the design constraint behind the child-theme work on The Province. The Province and The Vancouver Sun both ran as child themes on a single shared Postmedia parent during the 2011-2012 WordPress migration. The Province is the tabloid voice — sports-forward, headline-driven, a different cadence on the front page than the broadsheet next door. Forking the codebase to express that difference would have been the easy answer and the wrong one. The shared parent held performance, infrastructure, and platform integrations; the child held type treatment, headline density, image-to-text ratio in the article template, and the rhythm of the homepage column. Get those right in the child and the brand reads correctly even though the underlying stack is identical.
In 2011-2012, when Postmedia moved its network onto WordPress, The Province landed on WordPress VIP alongside its broadsheet sibling — at the time, one of a small handful of major Canadian news properties on the platform. VIP onboarding then required Automattic’s direct vetting and a codebase review before the first deploy. Two papers, one publisher, one shared parent, one VIP review — and the Vancouver newsroom kept editorial separation visible to the reader.
The pattern from this child theme build is one that comes up on every multi-brand publisher engagement: share the chrome, share the maintenance surface, hold the brand in the child.