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Custom WordPress rebuild for a multimedia newsroom

Client: Frontliner

Duration: ~4 months

Customer location: Ukraine

Industry: Media

Services: Custom Software Development ● UI/UX Design

Tech stack: UI-UX Design ● WordPress

Dedicated team behind the project

Bohdan

Frontend developer

Sergii

Middle WordPress Engineer

Iryna

UI/UX Designer

Sviatoslav

DevOps Engineer

Yevheniia

Project Manager

The client

Frontliner is a Ukrainian media outlet that covers Russia’s war against Ukraine from the ground. Their team of reporters delivers daily updates, interviews, and photo/video stories directly from the frontline. The newsroom emphasizes live interaction, facts-on-the-ground verification, and immersive storytelling.

Client achievements:

Live multilingual coverage

Delivers war-zone reporting in both Ukrainian and English, reaching audiences locally and abroad.

Interactive reporting

Encourages direct viewer participation via social channels and site-based submission tools.

Strong institutional partnerships

Backed by the European Endowment for Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, IRF, and other international foundations. Read more

The challenge

The existing CMS limited the team’s ability to manage and present high-quality multimedia reports. With hundreds of articles, images, and videos, Frontliner needed a modern infrastructure that would reflect the weight of their field reporting work without slowing down editorial speed.

The new platform had to combine:

full content migration
a highly visual layout for war photography
flexible multimedia templates
SEO optimization for discoverability

What was done

Ralabs fully migrated Frontliner’s content to a new custom WordPress theme. We designed a clean, mobile-ready layout tailored to large-format photojournalism and embedded video.
The editorial tools were rebuilt around modular, reusable components – giving reporters and editors more control without involving developers. SEO optimization was integrated from the start, ensuring structured metadata, schema markup,  and performance tuning.