You may have noticed that the Berkeleyside website looks a little bit different today.
That’s because we are migrating from our current publishing system to a new platform called Newspack, a WordPress build designed specifically for local newsrooms.
The switch means a major overhaul of the site’s back end, which will make Berkeleyside more secure and streamlined. It will give us more flexibility in how we display stories and improve elements related to membership and sponsorship. Plus, it will make it easier to cross-publish and collaborate with our sister site, The Oaklandside, which has used the Newspack platform since its launch in June 2020.
We’re grateful for a $20,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to help with the migration work. The project was a gigantic, yearlong undertaking overseen by Cityside News Platforms Director Doug Ng, who designed Berkeleyside originally, and required each page of Berkeleyside to be reviewed and recreated from scratch.
We hope there’s minimal initial change to your experience reading stories on Berkeleyside, but you may notice some small glitches and goblins, especially over the next few days. We’re still working on restoring comment bubbles, setting up the site’s search function, and changing how author bios display at the bottom of posts, for example.
If you see anything else we should know about, please let us know by emailing newspack@berkeleyside.org.
Featured photo: Alex Knight
