FISM Newsroom 6.20.2

A production WordPress newsroom and media-center experience for Financial Issues Stewardship Ministries. It turns an existing press-release content model into an accessible, searchable editorial surface for press releases, interviews, op-eds, appearances, and media resources.

View the live newsroom

Engineering highlights

• Accessible search, filters, pagination, focus states, and reduced-motion behavior
• Responsive editorial card system with consistent content rhythm
• Existing WordPress post-type integration without a destructive data migration
• External artwork extraction and resilient media handling
• Producer-focused press kit with optional downloadable assets
• Performance-conscious CSS marquee with no JavaScript animation loop

Technology

PHP, WordPress hooks and shortcodes, JavaScript, CSS, semantic HTML, responsive design, and accessibility-focused interaction states.

Detailed release notes

Presentation rebuild. The thumbnail extraction pipeline, pagination, search and filtering logic from 5.8.0 are untouched — only the UI/UX layer changed.

Who this is designed for

Primary audience is Financial Issues supporters and viewers, who skew 55+. Secondary audience is producers and bookers arriving from an outlet. Every decision below follows from that.

What changed

Reading order fixed. The hero now runs eyebrow, headline, lede, actions. Search and the type filters moved out of the hero and now sit directly above the results they control. Previously the sentence explaining the page rendered below the search box and filter buttons.

Type scale rebuilt. 56 / 32 / 22 / 20 / 18 / 15 / 13. The H1 dropped from 102px to a 56px cap, and card titles rose from 18px to 22px. There is now a real middle to the scale, so section headings sit under the page title instead of competing with it.

Contrast corrected. The brand gold (#EA9A32) measures about 2.3:1 on the cream ground and was being used for text. It is now structural only — rules, active underlines, focus rings. Type labels use a darkened gold (#8A5410) and navy, both above 5.9:1. Body copy is 18px minimum at 7:1 or better.

Card dead space removed. Cards were locked to 500px, leaving 73–97px of empty space above every date. Cards now size to content and excerpts clamp to exactly three lines, so every card in a row ends the same way.

Controls enlarged. Buttons and pagination are 52px, filters and the search clear are 48px+, and the search field is 56px. Every interactive element has a visible focus ring.

Filters read as editorial. Bordered white boxes replaced with text tabs and a gold underline on the active one, matching the site's own navigation.

Featured In is a continuous marquee. Arrows gone. The track renders the logo set twice and slides exactly half its width, so the loop is seamless with no JavaScript driving it. Edges are feathered with a CSS mask so logos enter and leave rather than getting chopped. It pauses on hover, on keyboard focus, and via a quiet pause button — auto-moving content needs a stop that does not depend on hover, which keyboard and touch users do not have. Under prefers-reduced-motion it does not move at all and falls back to a wrapped static row. Logos normalised to 42px optical height, left in full colour.

Cards are one contained surface. Artwork sits flush inside the card and the card clips the corners, so the image and the text read as a single object rather than two things stacked on the page background. 14px radius, hairline border, and a 1px resting shadow that lifts to a soft 32px on hover. Hover also scales the artwork 4% and wipes a gold underline across the headline. Press releases carry no artwork, so a 4px gold cap stands in for the image and keeps them the same weight of object as the rest of the grid. Section heads lead with a short gold bar rather than a full-width rule.

Press kit added. A block for producers: booking bio, media contact, and optional headshot / biography / logo downloads. Uses the media_contact, headshot_url, bio_url, logos_url and media_bio attributes that 5.8.0 declared but never rendered.

Copy fixes. "Op Ed" is now "Op-Eds", "Interview" is "Interviews", "Press Release" is "Press Releases". The decorative 01/02/03 section markers are gone.

6.20.2

Masthead tightened. It stood 719px tall and now stands 608px, with the slack taken out rather than moved around.

• The 56px gap under the logo wall was the grid's row gap. The hero is a grid and the jump line is its second row, so gap: 3.5rem was spacing them apart. Split into column-gap: 3.5rem and row-gap: 0; the jump rule now follows the wall by 24px.
• The panel is shorter, which is what set the whole masthead's height: rows to 54px thumbs and .7rem padding, label rule tighter, box padding 1.2rem/.5rem. Four entries means every row's padding counted twice over.
• Hero logo rows grew to 104px with an 88px cap, absorbing height into the shorter column instead of leaving it as air - and the marks read better for it.
• Hero padding 3.25/2rem to 2.75/1.5rem.

The two columns still finish on the same line, and the space above the logo wall's rule is down from 141px to 46px - enough to separate the actions from the wall, not enough to read as a hole.

6.20.1

• The dead space under As Seen On is closed. The Latest panel is the taller of the two masthead columns, so the copy column ended early and left a void between the logo wall and the jump rule. The masthead grid is now align-items: stretch, the copy column is a flex column, and the logo wall takes margin-top: auto - so it sits on the floor of its column and both columns finish on the same line. The leftover height moves above the wall, where its top rule already reads as a divider.
• Hero logo rows tightened to a 60px box, the wall's bottom padding removed, and the jump line's top margin cut from 2.75rem to 1.5rem, so nothing hangs below the logos before the rule.

6.20.0

• A jump line on the floor of the masthead. One rule spanning both hero columns, then "SEE MORE" and the three sections with their counts and a down arrow: Op-Eds 14, Interviews 22, Press Releases 10. It sits at the fold, so the first screen ends by naming what is below it and how much of it there is. Anchors to #newsroom-op-ed, #newsroom-interview, #newsroom-press-release.
• Clicking one scrolls smoothly, pushes the hash so the back button works, and moves focus to the section heading so keyboard and screen-reader users arrive there too. Instant rather than smooth under prefers-reduced-motion.
• scroll-margin-top: 6rem on sections so the site header does not cover the heading that was jumped to.
• Counts removed from the Browse-by-type chips. The jump line states the same three numbers about a hundred pixels above them; twice that close reads as noise. Section heads keep their total, far enough down the page to be useful again.
• On narrow screens the line stacks into three full-width rows with the count ranged right, each a 48px target.

6.19.0

• The masthead panel now carries two op-eds and two interviews instead of three interviews, and is labelled "Latest Op-Eds & Interviews". Queried two per type rather than as one list of four, so a busy month of interviews can never push the written commentary out entirely; the four are then sorted newest-first across both types.

• The Newsroom no longer reads as three articles. Only three cards show per section, and the first outside reaction to the page was "wait, there's only three articles?" - so the page now states its own scale in two places, before and during the scroll:

  • the Browse-by-type chips carry counts: All 46, Op-Eds 14, Interviews 22, Press Releases 10, sitting directly under the masthead;
  • each section head states its total beside the heading - "14 OP-EDS".

  Both are plain numbers in existing furniture rather than a scroll cue or an arrow; a chevron says "there is more" but not how much, and the count is what actually contradicts the wrong impression. .fism-newsroom__head-side was display: none because it held nothing - it holds the count now.

6.18.2

• Stale notification links land on the Newsroom instead of a 404. The Partner's Hub freezes a notification's destination into post meta when the notification is created, so an entry that is later merged or removed leaves the notification pointing at a slug that no longer resolves. Any unresolved entry slug - query-var form or pretty permalink - now redirects to the Newsroom page, where the surviving entry for that appearance will be.
• New fism_newsroom_page_url() helper, filterable via fism_newsroom_page_url.

6.18.1

• The external redirect moved from template_redirect priority 5 to 11. FISM Notifications marks a notification read on template_redirect at the default priority 10, so redirecting any earlier would have sent the partner out to the publisher without ever clearing the badge - the notification would have stayed unread no matter how many times it was clicked.

6.18.0

Newsroom entries now have working pages.

The press-release post type was registered non-viewable by the main Financial Issues plugin, so no entry had a front end at all: /press-release/<slug>/ returned 404, and so did the ?press-release=<slug> form the Partner's Hub notification bar builds. That was invisible while the feed held only press releases nobody clicked through to. Now that it also carries op-eds and interviews, a partner clicking an interview in the notification bar landed on a 404 instead of the interview - and press-release cards on the Newsroom page pointed at the same dead URL.

• The post type is made public / publicly_queryable through the existing register_post_type_args filter, with rewrite slug press-release and no archive - the Newsroom page is the archive.
• Rewrite rules flush once per plugin version on init, because a plugin update does not re-run the activation hook.
• A template_redirect handler sends any single entry that has an external source straight to that source. Page Links To normally does this; owning it here means the redirect survives that plugin being disabled and covers the notification-bar URLs too.

Net effect: interviews and op-eds open at the publisher, genuine press releases open on their own shareable page, from the notification bar and the Newsroom page alike.

6.17.3

• The masthead now blends into the site menu. The hero's texture layer carried filter: saturate(.78) contrast(.96), and a filter applies to the whole layer stack - including the opaque cream veil over the photograph. So the top of the hero rendered cooler and paler than the menu bar above it and drew a hard line across the full width. The filter is gone; the softening it did is carried by the veil opacities instead, at both the desktop and the narrow-screen breakpoint.
• --fism-paper corrected from #EEDFCA to #EEDFCB, the exact cream the site header paints, so the two grounds are the same colour rather than one unit apart.

6.17.2

• As Seen On is now one row. All five outlet logos stay on a single horizontal line instead of wrapping three-over-two.
• Logos are larger. The desktop logo box is increased substantially, with the masthead row allowed to use part of the gutter so the marks remain readable without colliding with the Latest panel.
• Mobile stays one row too. On narrow screens the logo row becomes swipeable rather than shrinking or wrapping.

6.13.1

• As Seen On is sized for the masthead column. The wall sits under the two actions, ranged left with the rest of the copy, at 180x58 per mark instead of the old 130x44 - large enough to read at a glance and enough to fill the space that was empty beneath the buttons.

6.13.0

Built on 6.12.1.

• Featured In is now a static wall. Five marks - Fox Business, CBN News, Blaze Media on the top row, Newsmax and Townhall centred beneath. The duplicated track, the animation, the pause button and its JS are gone. Every logo is fitted to the same 190x64 box rather than capped by height alone, so a short wide wordmark reads at the same weight as a tall one.
• Card footers. "Program / Destination" is gone. The outlet now sits at the foot of the card as the linked destination, with the date on the right of the same line, so Op-Eds and Interviews carry dates the way Press Releases always did.
• Latest from the Newsroom stretches to the height of the masthead and drops the divider under its last entry, so the panel ends where the content ends instead of leaving ground beneath it.
• Section intros rewritten.

6.12.1

• Program / Destination is pinned to the bottom of each Op-Ed and Interview card body, so the divider and destination row stay aligned across a three-card row regardless of headline length.
• Featured Image now has absolute artwork priority. If an editor sets one, the plugin does not request or render the external thumbnail for that card.
• External destination thumbnails are still discovered automatically when no Featured Image is set, with the existing destination placeholder used if extraction fails.

6.12.0

• Removed the Newsroom hero description to tighten the masthead.
• Moved the As Seen On logo marquee into the hero beneath the interview CTAs in a compact format.
• Newsroom pagination now shows 3 cards per section at a time.
• Op-Ed and Interview cards are shorter: type, title, and Program / Destination only.
• Press Release cards keep their description and date.
• External Op-Ed/Interview artwork is discovered automatically when no Featured Image is set.