Curator For WordPress: An editing tool that gives enterprise website teams more control

Enterprise marketing teams need the freedom to publish content, rearrange featured stories, and adjust page layouts as priorities change, without waiting for developers to handle every update.

At Reaktiv, we built Curator, our proprietary WordPress plugin, to give editors greater control over how content appears across their websites while making development faster and future changes easier. Curator combines customizable content layouts with intuitive editing controls that work directly within the native WordPress block editor. 

Our clients can manage sophisticated pages, rearrange articles, feature specific content, adjust visual elements, and change layouts while maintaining the design standards established for their website, and our developers can extend it to meet different project requirements. 

Curator began with a challenge from a major news organization

We originally developed Curator for a global news media outlet migrating from its proprietary content management system to WordPress.

The organization’s editorial team was accustomed to having precise control over its homepage. Editors could select which stories appeared in specific positions, arrange articles into complicated multi-column layouts, and make frequent changes throughout the day. They also needed a visual editing experience that closely matches what visitors see on the published site.

WordPress already offered tools for displaying collections of content, including the core Query Loop block. But its flexibility added complexity to the editorial workflows this team needed. We’d also built custom layout tools for previous projects. Those supported predefined arrangements with designated content slots, but changing those layouts often required developers to modify code, review changes, and deploy an update.

We needed a system that preserved the organization’s editorial capabilities, offered editors direct control over content placement and presentation, provided designers with ways to maintain their design system, and gave developers a flexible system they could extend as requirements changed.

I was given a couple of weeks to focus only on the initial solution. What emerged was Curator, built around two custom WordPress blocks called Storylines and Feed. The original project provided an opportunity to solve a specific editorial challenge. Once we had a solution in hand, we saw how useful it could be for other enterprise website builds.

Two WordPress blocks provide flexible ways to display content

Most websites display content in a collection of cards. Their appearance can vary widely, from a prominent feature article to a grid of top stories to a carousel of related stories. Curator provides two WordPress blocks to build complex combinations of content types and styles. Each starts with card designs that our developers configure to match the design system. This gives editors a consistent foundation without dictating the content.

Storylines supports complex editorial layouts

Storylines allows editors to create multi-column layouts where individual cards can have different designs. A news site’s homepage, for example, might combine:

• A large lead story with a large image and prominent headline.
• Several smaller articles with smaller headlines and thumbnail images.
• The three latest articles covering current events that only display the headline.
• An ad or promotional element.

With Curator, editors can adjust column widths, change how many articles appear, and customize individual cards. A lead article can use a different font size and image treatment from the cards around it, even though they belong to the same content query. This is particularly useful for homepages where editorial emphasis changes frequently.

Feed supports consistent content collections

Feed lets editors arrange cards with a shared design into vertical stacks, horizontal rows, grids, or carousels. These collections work well for article archives, search results, related content, and sections where a consistent presentation helps visitors browse.

Both blocks can display automatic queries, manually selected articles, or a mix of both. 

Content selection operates independently from layout, so editors can adjust design options without changing how content is sourced. A manually curated set of stories can appear in a consistent feed, and an automatically populated Storylines section can display several different card styles. The block determines the presentation, while the query or manual selection determines the content.

The separation of content and layout also makes Curator useful across pages with very different publishing demands. Editors may want an automatic grid on an archive page, a handpicked collection on a campaign page, and a homepage that mixes pinned stories with the latest articles. Curator can support a variety of content design options with the same underlying tools and project-specific card styles.

Editors can customize layouts directly in WordPress

A main Curator priority was making the editing experience intuitive.A main Curator priority was making the editing experience intuitive.

People who manage websites are focused on publishing articles, running campaigns, and keeping information current. Curator makes those responsibilities easier through editing controls that feel like part of WordPress.

Our developers establish the default card designs as a starting point, and editors can then make adjustments directly in the block editor, with a consistent visual experience on the front- and back-end. This is especially useful for teams that publish frequently or work across many sections of a large-scale website.

Depending on the configuration, editors can:

• Change the position of featured images, including moving them above or beside headlines.
• Adjust headline sizes, colors, and other visual settings.
• Show or hide elements such as bylines, tags, excerpts, badges, and reading times.
• Rearrange cards with drag-and-drop controls.
• Change the number of articles displayed in a collection.
• Adjust column widths and switch between supported layout arrangements.
• Modify the spacing and presentation of content collections.

Editors see their changes immediately, with the layout in the block editor matching what visitors see on the front end. They can also turn individual elements on or off for a specific card without changing the default design.

We’ve also found the flexibility valuable during development. 

If a layout needs a change, we can make it in the editor quickly, then incorporate it into the project’s codebase when appropriate, which reduces the steps required to implement smaller visual presentation updates.

Automatic content feeds can include handpicked stories

We have decades of experience working with enterprise content teams, and know they frequently need to balance automated publishing with editorial oversight. For example, an organization might want its homepage to display the latest articles from a particular category while keeping an important announcement in a prominent position.

Curator supports blended workflows through automatic queries and pinned posts. 

Editors can pin selected articles into designated positions while the remaining posts update automatically. They can also search for and manually select content across the website’s available post types. This gives teams control over which stories receive attention without requiring them to rebuild content collections when new content is published.

For example:

• A corporate marketing team can keep a major announcement in the lead position while the other slots continue showing the latest stories from a designated category. When that announcement no longer needs priority placement, they can remove the pin and return the position to the automatic feed. 
• A university communications team can maintain a featured research announcement at the top of a news collection, while populating recent faculty stories in surrounding cards.

Custom content can appear alongside articles and posts

Curator’s extensibility lets us place specialized content inside editorial collections. 

For the original news media project, we created a way to replace a standard article with a live video player while preserving the layout. Editors could move the player and control settings, including whether to display a live video badge. The same underlying approach can support advertising, polls, subscription promotions, and campaign calls to action.

Because we can customize the content element and its controls, we can build custom editorial experiences around each client’s publishing and business requirements. That flexibility is especially valuable for websites where content presentation supports business objectives beyond publishing.

Curator gives developers a reusable foundation for custom websites

Curator has become a valuable part of how we build WordPress websites. Creating custom content collections once meant building new templates and layout functionality for each project, even if we could reuse pieces of previous work. Now, Curator gives us a common starting point that we can adapt to each website.

• The plugin includes a default card design compatible with WordPress block-based themes. Our developers can create additional card designs, assign them to particular post types, and establish project-specific defaults. 
• Curator also provides filters and actions that allow developers to customize how it retrieves content, renders cards, and manages layouts. 
• We’ve also added grid layouts and explored additional applications, including calendar-style displays built on Curator’s existing content selection capabilities.

We can extend individual card elements, introduce new layout arrangements, or change how a query works while retaining the functionality. Instead of rebuilding collections, we can replace or extend the component responsible for that behavior. That structure makes changes easier to maintain and support ongoing improvements.

A reusable, extensible plugin helps us to focus development time on the requirements that make each website different. It helps us build faster while preserving the ability to create highly customized experiences.

Every Curator implementation helps us improve the plugin

Since the original newsroom project, we’ve made Curator more configurable and brought it into several other enterprise website builds. The same underlying plugin can look and behave differently depending on each client’s brand and publishing needs.

• For a large enterprise technology company’s blog, we used Curator for featured article layouts, search results grids, carousels, collections within tabs, and related posts integrated with Jetpack.
• For a telecommunications industry organization, Curator helped our developers fast-track development startup time and focus on the more complex parts of the project.
• For a university with multiple colleges and departments, Curator can support shared visual standards while giving individual teams ways to feature research, campus news, and student stories.

Every new use case is an opportunity to make Curator more useful for the organizations already relying on it.

Our developers, designers, quality assurance specialists, accessibility experts, and user experience specialists contribute to feedback and improvements as we use the plugin. We review everything from how a control is labeled to how a component behaves on a live site. It’s an ongoing process of refining the editorial experience and checking that new functionality works across projects already using Curator.

We’re currently working on more intuitive responsive-layout controls, so editors can configure column arrangements for desktop, tablet, and mobile screens with less reliance on custom CSS or developer support. Owning and maintaining Curator means we can apply improvements across existing projects and bring new capabilities into future builds.

Our investment in Curator reflects how we approach enterprise WordPress development

A website’s long-term value depends partly on how well those responsible for it can manage, use, and improve it. Marketing teams need tools that support routine changes, and organizations need a development partner who can respond quickly when requirements grow more complex.

We’ve built Curator to fit naturally into the WordPress editing experience, so editors can work with familiar blocks and controls. And because its components are reusable and extensible, our team can add new layouts, custom card elements, and content integrations without recreating the system for every project.

We invested in Curator and our own suite of WordPress tools because we believe the editing experience and the ability to make future changes matter just as much as the website on launch day. Our clients benefit from capabilities we’ve already developed, experience gained across enterprise projects, and improvements we continue to make.

For organizations planning a WordPress migration, redesign, or new digital platform, access to tools like Curator can make a meaningful difference in development efficiency and day-to-day website management. If you’re looking for a digital partner who invests in making enterprise websites easier to build, manage, and improve, we’d welcome the opportunity to talk about what Reaktiv can create for your organization.