Information for Contributors

Important Technical Information

Architecture

The latest rendition of the site was built very differently than what you’re probably used to and knowing some of these details are important for you to understand. The content is all managed in WordPress obviously, so writing and managing your posts should be straightforward. However, what visitors actually see is not a WP theme.

WordPress is built using PHP, but we prefer to code in a completely different technology: ASP.NET. As a result, we’re using the JSON API plugin which allows the content and other information about your posts to be used by our custom front-end.

In order to wrangle things to look and work just the way we want, the front-end does some cleanup and manipulation to what WordPress spits out. What you see when you’re editing the post is a little different than what it looks like in the end because of this.

Caching

To make sure the site loads as fast as possible, content from posts is cached. As a result, new posts don’t show up as soon as you publish them. Likewise, if you make a change to a published post, that change may not show up for a while.

To help with this, we’ve created a tool that will allow you to force your changes to take effect without needing to wait.

Images

We love big, bold photos in posts. Unfortunately, images slow down sites more than anything else. To make sure pages don’t load at a crawl, the site takes care of all the photo resizing for you. So, you can upload a giant photo if you like and don’t need to worry about having to make it smaller.

If you want a specific image to be used for the thumbnail preview on the home page or category pages, set the Featured Image. Otherwise, it will default to the first image that appears in the post.