The Vancouver Sun is the broadsheet of the Pacific coast — founded 1912, the senior English daily in British Columbia, the paper a reader picks up expecting the day’s news to have already been sorted into priority before they ever scrolled. Longer pieces, denser front page, a more analytic posture than its tabloid sibling across the street in the same building. The performance and customization work for that reader is genuinely different than the work for a tabloid reader, and the WordPress® child theme decisions reflected that.
The broadsheet child theme
The newsroom theme work on the Sun ran in 2011-2012, in parallel with the smaller child theme build for The Province. Both papers ran as children on the same shared Postmedia parent — the architectural pattern that let eleven editorially distinct properties share one upstream codebase — 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 for politics, business, B.C. coverage, and arts carried real weight in a way they do not at every regional paper, and homepage editorial controls had to surface a serious lead story without the chrome competing for attention.
The work was performance and reader-attention discipline, tuned to a reader who arrived intending to read. The Vancouver market is also distinct from the other major Canadian metros in editorial terms — Pacific Rim coverage matters here in a way it does not in Toronto, federal politics lands at a different distance, and the BC provincial story carries section weight on its own. Holding that distinctness in the child theme — not letting the National Post’s editorial defaults dictate the Sun’s homepage — is the work that protected the paper’s identity through the migration.
Why VIP for a broadsheet
Long-form journalism rewards a reader who stays on the page. The hosting and platform decisions matter directly for that — page weight, time-to-first-paint, scroll cadence, the cumulative layout shift that interrupts a reader two paragraphs into a five-thousand-word piece. WordPress VIP was the platform that let the broadsheet template hold up under traffic from day one rather than being something to fix in the second sprint. The platform’s production posture was settled at the parent-theme review (described in the National Post entry) before the Sun’s child ever inherited it.
- The work: Broadsheet child theme on the shared Postmedia parent; long-form article templates and editorial-priority homepage controls
- Architecture: Shared parent with The Province and the rest of the Postmedia network
- Client: Postmedia Network Inc. (The Vancouver Sun)
- Period: 2011-2012
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.
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