The TRiiBE is a Black-owned media company covering news, culture and community in Chicago. It runs like a newsroom, not a blog — multiple daily contributors, member-funded revenue, a merch store and a members-only newsletter. Everything on the site had to be editable by editorial staff with zero developer involvement.
The challenge
- A publishing team, not a technical one — nothing could require code to update
- Reader-funded model needed recurring memberships and flexible one-off donations
- Paid and free content living side by side without breaking the reading experience
- Email capture spread across the site, all needing to land in one list
- Special editorial features deserved more than a standard article template
What we built
- Fully dynamic newsroom architecture — News, Culture, People and Store verticals, each with its own archive, hierarchy and homepage module
- Editor-controlled homepage: lead story, section blocks, Must Reads, Members Only, Latest, video rail and store promo all managed from the dashboard
- Article template with multi-author bylines, published/updated timestamps, inline captions, corrections notice, related articles sidebar and social sharing
- Inline newsletter and membership prompts placed mid-article and post-article
- Video hub, light/dark mode toggle, full responsive build
- Site-wide dark mode — a persistent reader preference, not a CSS filter. Full token-based theming across articles, image captions, embeds, forms and the store, with the reader’s choice remembered between visits and system preference respected on first load
Membership & giving
- WooCommerce Subscriptions powering recurring memberships, with member-only content gating
- Name Your Price implemented for one-time contributions, so readers choose their own amount
- Membership and donation CTAs surfaced contextually inside articles rather than bolted into the footer
Custom post types
- Paid Posts — a dedicated CPT for gated and sponsored content with its own access rules and template
- Interactive Features — an animated post type for special occasions and editorial moments, giving the team a scroll-driven format outside the standard article layout
Klaviyo integration
Hand-coded against the Klaviyo API — no plugin. Every capture point on the site pushes into the correct list with source tagging, and membership status syncs across so subscriber segments stay accurate for campaigns.
Results
- Editorial team publishes, gates and promotes content entirely unassisted
- Members on recurring subscriptions
- Newsletter Subscribers
- Skelton Placeholder
- Light and Dark Mode Template
