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Breaking Council approves $310m emergency flood levy in 7–4 vote

How The Draft is built

A newsroom on WordPress VIP

The Draft is a demonstration publication. Everything you see, from the curated homepage to live coverage, runs on WordPress VIP with core Gutenberg blocks and a small set of well-maintained plugins. Here's the platform underneath, and where to see each part working.

01

Edge caching & CDN

Every page you read here was served from VIP's global edge cache. A breaking story can take an election-night traffic spike with zero extra configuration, and the breaking news bar purges only what changed.

See it: Reload this page: the second load comes straight from the edge.

02

Enterprise Search

On-site search and the complex queries behind personalised rails run on VIP's Elasticsearch-backed Enterprise Search, not the database.

See it: Try the search in the masthead.

03

Image CDN

Every photo is resized, compressed and delivered responsively by VIP's image CDN. There's no image plugin, and no oversized hero images on mobile.

See it: Open the photo essay on a throttled connection.

04

Horizontal autoscaling

Containerised infrastructure scales out automatically under load. The election-night spike doesn't need an ops call.

See it: Ask about the busiest news night you've had.

05

Security & compliance

FedRAMP-authorised hosting, SSO and two-factor login, a read-only production file system, and a full audit log of content and code changes.

See it: A dedicated beat for infosec and legal stakeholders.

06

VIP Workflows (beta)

Editors model the newsroom's real process as stages: draft, copy edit, standards review, scheduled. Each transition carries its own tools, notifications and role rules, and an AI agent can own a stage with bars it must clear before content moves on.

See it: Open any draft and look at the Workflow sidebar. VIP Workflows is pre-GA and labelled Beta throughout this demo.

07

Headless-ready

Everything here is also available over the WordPress REST API with no extra setup, for apps, partners or a future re-platform.

See it: Add /wp-json/wp/v2/posts to this site's address.

08

Multisite

One installation can run many mastheads and regional editions, sharing code, users and workflows.

See it: A second edition is one command away.

09

GitHub-backed deploys

Mandatory code review, hourly backups, 24/7 monitoring, and a local environment that mirrors production. That's what makes a newsroom's bespoke code safe to ship often.

See it: The breaking news block on this site shipped through exactly this flow.

10

Parse.ly

Trending rails and editor-side performance data come from Parse.ly, part of the same Automattic family as VIP, Jetpack and WordPress.com.

See it: The Trending now rail on the homepage.