Profiles

Hooray Media’s WordPress story started with frustration. As a small print and digital publisher, we found that many web developers who worked with small businesses were accustomed to building relatively static websites. Publishing was different. Our sites were constantly changing, with thousands of articles, authors, places, events and other entities, along with increasingly complicated metadata, structured data and relationships between all that content.

So we started learning WordPress and bringing more of our web development in-house. What began as trying to build better websites for our own publications gradually led us much further down the rabbit hole—Schema.org, semantic data, ontologies, defined terms, entities, knowledge graphs, triplestores, linked open data, and better ways to organize and manage large collections of editorial content.

Today, we’re working on a new publishing platform that combines WordPress with headless publishing and more structured, semantic approaches to content management. Along the way, we’ve built a lot of smaller tools to solve everyday problems for our own publications.

Hooray Plugins grew naturally out of that work. Rather than keeping those tools to ourselves, we’re beginning to turn the useful ones into simple WordPress plugins that other publishers and site owners can use too. We’re publishers first, so the goal is less about adding more technology for its own sake and more about making some of the complicated parts of modern digital publishing a little easier.