The Vancouver Sun is the broadsheet — longer pieces, denser front page, a reader who arrived expecting the day’s news to be sorted into priority before they ever scrolled. The performance work for that reader is different than the work for a tabloid reader, and the customization decisions in the Sun’s child theme reflected that.
I did newsroom theme work on the Sun in 2011-2012, in parallel with The Province. Both papers ran as child themes on the same shared Postmedia parent, but the Sun’s priorities were specific. Article templates had to make long-form actually feel long-form, not a stretched blog post. Section landings — politics, business, B.C., arts — carried real weight here in a way they don’t at every regional paper, and homepage editorial controls had to carry a serious lead story without the chrome competing for attention. None of that is exotic engineering. All of it is performance and ergonomics tuned to a reader who’s reading.
In 2011-2012, when Postmedia moved its network of daily newspapers onto WordPress, The Vancouver Sun landed on WordPress VIP — at the time, one of a small handful of major Canadian news properties on the platform. VIP onboarding then required direct vetting from Automattic’s VIP team and a codebase review before the first deploy. That review process is part of why the long-form template held up under traffic from day one rather than being something to fix in the second sprint.
The lesson I carried out: a broadsheet’s WordPress theme has to make restraint a default. Anything in the template not earning its place is taking attention from the journalism.
