If you need to view the slide notes (primarily for me, to be honest, but you may see some points that got cut during the presentation) you’ll have to visit the Slideshare site.

And, proudly, we’d like to say we had a little bit to do with the project.  Not a lot, mind – we provided some consultancy, some code snippets, advice and developer support now and then.  It’s the kind of project we’d have loved to have taken on in full, but the in-house team at the Telegraph were perfectly capable of doing the work and we always say that if you have the in-house skills then you shouldn’t spend a small fortune on external consultants and developers.

The Telegraph's blogs, running on WordPress MU

The site is a fairly typical MU implementation, but with a few interesting tweaks in the way they’ve configured.  Instead of giving each journalist their own blog, they’ve understood that some simply won’t be that active.  Instead, authors tend towards having a category of their own to work with.  So if you go to Shane Richmond’s blog, for instance, you’re actually seeing the Author Archive view that WordPress provides, within the general Technology Blog.

In fact, the flexibility of WordPress, the way you can output content differently according to category or author, all helped to contribute towards creating a platform that Telegraph Media feel they can grow with.

Challenges

One of the key things to think about with media blogs like this is that traffic can be astonishing.  A lot of questions were asked early on about scalability and performance in WordPress.  Because it’s a purely dynamic system, running more like an application than a group of static files, different approaches have to be taken with caching and performance.  The database server is one key area that always needs consideration – especially when you have to consider 200 concurrent users.

One interesting lesson learned is that with WordPress you have to be exceptionally careful about go-live processes.  Our standard process is to run two installs – one for pre-production and one for live.  There is never a beta running that suddenly finds itself running on a different domain name.

At the Telegraph we know that the way they did it was to run a beta on a subdomain prior to running a search and replace script (not sure if it was one of our own developer’s PHP database search and replace scripts that we use for migrations) and then point the domains right over to it.  That resulted in poor performance initially, even though load testing had confirmed everything to be OK.  Consequently the go-live was held back for a few days, but once WordPress had settled down performance picked up markedly.  The issue appears to be to do with cached variables not resetting on the move.  We’ll document our low-hassle approach to migrating WordPress installs shortly on this site.

The Future

Well, we can’t talk for what will happen at Telegraph Media in the future, but what we do see is increased interest in WordPress as a blogging tool for newspapers.  But beyond that it’s even more interesting – some groups like Informa Telecoms & Media are starting to use WordPress as complete news platforms.  For Informa we built the Telecoms.com site almost entirely from WordPress – this not only led to increased journalistic productivity, but increased traffic and reader engagement.  Seeing the comments section slowly spring to life as readers started to understand its potential has been a real joy to see.

We imagine that it will be magazines and local newspapers that make the first moves to WordPress as a news platform, but when will the first national do it?  We’d like to be there for them if they make the leap!  WordPress is fully capable thanks, in no part, to some of the excellent work in turning WP into what is essentially framework by Donncha O’Caoimh, a WordPress core developer, and others on the WordPress.org team.

If the interest in The Telegraph’s move by such important figures as Kevin Anderson at the Guardian, Simon Dickson (a WordPress friendly rival who specialises in e-Government sites), and others is anything to go by then WordPress is booming in the news sector.  Good!

But what happens if our clients and potential clients start to suffer as a consequence of an economic downturn?

Problem 1 – Spending Cutbacks

During uncertain times, many businesses choose to be careful on spending outside of their company.  In particular they may look to what are perceived as cost centres (website updates, build and application development) as being something that can wait for a while.  If that’s the case, there’s going to be a slowdown in spending on technology unless it’s deemed as essential for the company to operate.

Problem 2 – Credit Freezes

Thankfully we’re based in the North of England – this is an area which is traditionally very conservative with money.  People don’t like to borrow money or use complex financial instruments and most SMEs in the North West still tend towards being self-financed.  However, this article’s aimed at everyone.  Business that rely on finance will face certain problems.  In particular, curiously, the ones that have a moderate but high risk position are the ones who face the biggest chance of foreclosure.

Why?  Well it’s time to think like a banker.

1. Example 1: This business has loans of £100,000, assets of only about £30,000, and sales have plummeted.  However, the business is still viable if it can renegotiate its loan terms.

   If the bank decides to close this company it will definitely lose £70,000.  In renegotiating the loan the business will continue to  function, and the bank will get its money, albeit over a longer period.

2. Example 2: Another business has been far more careful with its money and has a £30,000 loan with assets of £100,000.  However, sales have died due to the downturn and income is poor.  They too need a renegotiation as their cashflow situation makes it impossible to meet the loan payments.

   In this case the bank, needing to bring in money to improve its cash position, will be less inclined to renegotiate.  After all, if it closes the loan it will get everything back – the full £30k.  Their cash position is improved and everyone’s happy.  The business may struggle now because it’s now £30k down on cashflow.  In fact, it could even fold because suddenly there’s no cash left in the company to help pay its wages and bills.  Worse, it can’t even negotiate a loan against its assets because all the banks are being ultra-cautious, will take one look at the cashflow problems and decide to look for someone safer to lend to.

   You also have to think very carefully about any secured loans.  In the event of a repossession it’s possible for the bank to get everything.  They may repossess your premises and resell them at a significant profit.  In many jurisdictions there’s no compulsion for them to share or give the profit to the original debtor.

Problem 3 – Price Inflation

Inflation is pretty steady in the UK still.  But we still have one massive problem – we’re starting to sell internationally.  Countries that trade internationally in dollars will have found their costs rising dramatically when dealing with EU based economies.  It’s not that long ago since a British pound was worth $1.5 – yet now it buys $2.  But thankfully there’s an upside – the more steady, more sensible and less loan happy mainland Europeans have found their Euro increasing dramatically in value.  It makes our holidays to Europe more pricey, but the upside is that our services look a lot cheaper to Europeans – so as one market declines, another has grown.

But it’s not all bad….

Opportunity 1 – Competitive Pressure

Businesses that are struggling will need to fight to compete.  No longer will money simply roll through the door as naturally as leaves through a courtyard.  Instead some firms which have experienced an easy ride lately with their easy finance, will need to get out there and find customers.  They’re going to need to invest in technologies that help push them up ahead of the competition.  This is where there could be some real growth in the web technology market – at least, for the companies that can give the best results.

Opportunity 2 – People With Time

If there is a downturn it’ll mean more people with less work to do – perhaps not needing to work so many hours, or even higher levels of unemployment.  For them the web will be one of the cheaper forms of entertainment available to them.  They’ll be getting into blogging, Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, and even maybe dabbling a little and learning how to code themselves.  They’ll help the market to grow and will be enthusiasts for the business in the future.

Opportunity 3 – Weak Rivals Will Decline

One of the best things about a recession can be that the really weak rivals will suffer.  Web designers, for example, who churn out poorly thought out and over-priced websites will find themselves at a disadvantage to those with a reputation for positive results.  They’ll either have to reposition themselves more truthfully (at the economy market perhaps) or spend some time improving.  It’s also worth looking out for closing companies and seeing if you can pick up their past clients.  Filling a dead-man’s boots may not seem too ethical, but chances are it’ll be a relief for those clients to know there’s still someone around who they can rely on.