For Prime members and non-Prime members, I wanted to give you an important update on the site and any technical or ad related issues you may have seen in recent days or may see in the next few days.
For many years, we’ve published TPM on our own proprietary CMS. That stands for ‘Content Management System’. But basically it means the software that runs the whole site. We are in the process of moving over to WordPress, a very widely used, industry standard CMS. I’ll discuss in a different post why we chose to do this. However, it’s a big, big change. On the surface it may sound like converting a Word document to an Apple Pages document, or any comparable document conversion. But it’s much more complex. It really means rebuilding a new version of the site (albeit one that looks and functions identically on the front end) on a new platform from the ground up and then shutting down the old one.
Ideally, all this happens without you even noticing. We’ve already switched you over to most of the new system and a lot more of the switch will likely happen today. But in such a complex process there are inevitably little glitches. With Prime, we’ve had a few reports of ads which are not supposed to run on Prime showing up on Prime.
As you know, there are ads on Prime. They are supposed to be there. But there are dramatically fewer ads on Prime than on the public site. We are not adding ads to Prime. This remains one of the key selling points for being a subscriber. If anything we plan to further reduce the small number of ads which run on Prime. But if you do see ads on Prime that you don’t think you were seeing before, it’s a glitch tied to this transition which we are working to resolve as soon as possible. Most of you aren’t seeing anything like this. But if you do, please shoot us an email as quickly as you can to siteissues at talkingpointsmemo.com. If possible, make sure you’re logged in and your account is current. And if you can send a screen cap that’s even better.
Whether you’re a Prime member or not, if you see anything that seems weird or off, please let us know at the same email address. We’ve been working hard to keep these glitches to an absolute minimum.
I’ll be updating you soon on other aspects of this switch, why we’re doing it and how it will allow us to improve the site in new and genuinely exciting ways.
