Dude, we are that frog: the story of Grist and WordPress

Almost exactly a year ago, my friend Nathan and I attended our first WordCamp with an ambitious to-do list:  learn the WordPress API, port two themes, import an archive of 13 years of content (39,000+ posts), launch the whole thing on the wordpress.com cloud and …. oh ya … help solve global warming.  One year later, we’re back! And, after a year of work and extremely generous help from many people, we’re happy to report that … we did it!  (Except the global warming part, that is still a problem.)  This is the highly-abridged story of how Grist — the nation’s coolest environmental blog and magazine — went WordPress.  I’ll share a few of the technical and business lessons we’ve learned this year, talk a bit about what it means to move an entire small media company to WordPress, and mention some of our successes and challenges since making the big switch.