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Code Hippies
News & Publishing2026

CarbonMedia

Multi-vertical news brand on a current PHP 8.2 runtime with reader-facing forms.

The engineering

Runs on PHP 8.2.30 (declared in x-powered-by) — a maintained, current runtime rather than a legacy 7.x install — serving a custom news application with three reader-facing forms, GA4 property G-BVNH0Z14GM and AdSense inventory, with WebSite + SearchAction JSON-LD.

In plain language

Covers news, business, tech, sport and politics under one brand, and lets readers search and subscribe without leaving the page.

The problem

What needed solving

A great many Indian publishing sites are still running end-of-life PHP 7. That is not a performance problem, it is an unpatched-runtime problem.

The approach

How it was built

  • Run the application on a supported PHP 8.2 runtime that still receives security patches.

  • Keep reader-facing forms — search, subscribe — server-validated rather than trusting client-side checks.

  • Declare a SearchAction so the brand can surface a sitelinks search box in results.

The outcome

What it produced

  • The runtime under the site is one that still receives security fixes.
  • Reader interaction happens on-page instead of bouncing to third-party forms.

Related work

Other builds with the same shape

This project sits under Security & compliance consulting. Here are the closest neighbours in the portfolio.

  • News & Publishing2026

    ReadyNews

    EngineeringA purpose-built PHP news portal (single /assets/js/app.js bundle with a cache-busting version query, no CMS footprint in the markup) behind Cloudflare, carrying a complete news structured-data graph — NewsMediaOrganization, CollectionPage, ItemList, BreadcrumbList, ImageObject, SearchAction — with GA4 and AdSense wired in.

    In plain termsA news site that loads fast on a cheap phone because there is no plugin stack sitting between the reader and the story.

    • PHP
    • Custom CMS
    • Cloudflare
    • GA4
  • News & Publishing2026

    IndiaNews16

    EngineeringSame custom PHP news engine as ReadyNews, deployed behind Cloudflare with dated build tags on its assets (app.js?v=20260705atlas1), serving a dense homepage — 90 internal links and 28 images in the initial HTML — under a NewsMediaOrganization / CollectionPage / BreadcrumbList / ItemList structured-data graph.

    In plain termsPuts a large amount of the day's news one click from the front page, without making the front page slow.

    • PHP
    • Custom CMS
    • Cloudflare
    • JSON-LD / Schema.org
  • News & Publishing2025

    NewsLive24

    EngineeringWordPress origin behind nginx, instrumented with GA4 via Google Tag Manager and monetised with Google AdSense; the document carries the richest structured-data graph of the portfolio — NewsArticle, NewsMediaOrganization, CollectionPage, ItemList, ContactPoint and SearchAction — plus hreflang alternates.

    In plain termsRuns a full English news desk on a CMS the editors already know, while the technical SEO and ad plumbing is handled underneath them.

    • WordPress
    • nginx
    • GA4 / Tag Manager
    • Google AdSense

Need something like CarbonMedia?

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