Editorial demos
We have created many custom features within WordPress to solve pain points and serve our clients’ enterprise needs. On this page, we have detailed some of this functionality.
Interactive API
The WordPress REST API allows you to import data from external sources into a React-based editor. This technique can be used for various purposes, such as displaying interactive data in charts, tables, and infographics.
For instance, we used this approach for The Times articles. We created an interactive ‘Web Components’ block that could import data from a third-party provider. With this block, an editor writing a sports story could locate the relevant match and import the Match Summary, Stats, Goals, and the league table at the time of writing.
This data can be directly queried from the editor and displayed visually using the React editor.
Queued edits
The queued edits plugin enables an editor to update a published post and either save the draft or schedule the update for a future time.
This is especially beneficial when editing a time-sensitive post or a post that will change in the future, such as special offer pricing. The feature allows journalists to schedule changes without relying on real-time updates.
The plugin creates a duplicate version of the post with the scheduled change, which is then merged with the original post at the set date and time.
Link suggestions
As part of the editorial workflow, adding in-story links and related content is a manual task carried out through the WordPress editor. To improve efficiency in this process, we developed a plugin designed to speed up the process of adding relevant internal links to other stories on The Times website, driven by a specified search term.
Located within the editor sidebar, this plugin allows editors to input a keyword, which fetches results from thetimes.co.uk and provides filtering options by date and relevancy. Once the relevant story is identified, the editor has the flexibility to either add the related post at the end of the story or embed a link into highlighted copy within the editor.
Both workflows are handled within the same area, streamlining the process of adding links in any form to a post.
Revisions
Our enhanced Revisions panel is a significant upgrade to the core revisions feature in WordPress, improving functionality and transforming the overall user experience. Using the functionality, editors and journalists can view the current version of an article – including all of its dynamic elements such as images, styles and meta-data – side-by-side with previous versions of the same article.
Changes between versions are clearly highlighted, enabling editors to quickly identify design variations and copy amendments.
The panel also includes an intuitive timeline feature, enabling editors to easily scroll through the entire history of an article to see how it’s evolved throughout each saved or published draft.