News Publishing Software and Services

Wrexham.com supports several other news publishing websites either formally or informally.

We have crafted our own software to help ease some processes, and have developed relationships with providers to create high availability hosting which deals not with ongoing large amounts of traffic but also coped with the peaks when a story breaks or goes viral.

Our software is available for licence with ongoing support and updates.

We operate on ‘LAMP’ – so Linux as the OS, Apache as the Web server, MySQL database and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. Our frontend CMS is WordPress. If you use similar our code should work with you

BBC LDRS WordPress Plugin

We have custom coded software that interacts with the BBC LDRS, or ‘Local Democracy’ reporting scheme API and allows a range of outcomes as it pulls the content into a WordPress environment. It allows multiple LDR areas to be covered, auto choice of behaviour (publish, draft or email – with post from email possible), default feed images, image gallery inserts, pre and post text inserts as well as some basic find-and-replace for common headlines. This system has been running since the start of the LDRS and has been involved in the publishing of thousands of stories.

Google News Showcase WordPress integration

Wrexham.com is part of the Google News Showcase publishing system – something slightly different from the normal Google News ingesting. Our custom coded software creates the feed that Google needs to ingest, with custom Overrides, Titles and the like. This enables hands free operation of the Showcase agreement.

Google’s documentation is not quite correct (!) so thanks to the Island Echo, The Edinburgh Reporter and others for helping us test it in a live environment to swat bugs and build feature requests. As a result the quirks around stickied posts, ingesting of PNGs, small images and a range of special characters are all dealt with via the software.

If you produce one or more panels a day and operate a WordPress CMS get in touch for pricing information. If you run a CMS that outputs a RSS feed or other, we can look to create a custom solution.

High Availability News Publishing Hosting

Working closely with a UK based provider over the last decade has resulted in a fine tuned set of packages both server side and WordPress setup to allow websites to run smoothly even with the highest of loads – and no surprise bandwidth or usage bills.

We would also be delighted to give a range of pointers on how your site could improve, site speed, image handling, light SEO, ad placement, providers & management !

Other examples of information based code projects that non-public but happy to have a chat on…

Council election system

A custom coded election system that has enabled candidates to login and complete Q&As per ward, interacted with around 300 local council candidates in Wrexham and on the Isle of Wight.

Pi-aware flight tracker to Twitter (X)

We have a Raspberry Pi with a PiAware ADS-B and MLAT Receiver set up. The JSON feed is then scraped every minute and scoured for specific information, ingested, and then outputted to a dedicated private Twitter feed to log and alert.

Frontpage scraper

Like many we stopped buying the local papers years ago. Now we get auto-emailed the frontpages as images every morning.

NHS Wait Times scraper

Sniffing the NHS app for local services we have a scraper set to log the ‘wait’ times.

Google Analytics GA4 Data API 

Live stats, also ‘top stories’ API queries that look at recent live date from Google Analytics, then hook into WordPress to create a relevant widget. This required a recode as the GA > GA4 move took place. ( For those looking up metricAggregations TOTAL – it is   ‘metricAggregations’ => [1, ] ;)  )

… and a few more that are alive/dead depending on how code, sites or API changes!