Coconuts
Coconuts was Southeast Asia's irreverent city news network, publishing across eight cities to millions of readers a month. We rebuilt the WordPress platform it ran on and kept it fast, monetised and online through to its 2023 farewell.
A custom Genesis WordPress rebuild that carried eight city editions, a membership paywall and a full advertising stack through Coconuts' final and busiest years, then kept the archive standing.
What we were solving
From 2011 to 2023, Coconuts was the alternative voice of urban Asia. Its city editions (Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bali and Yangon) served what it called "forward-thinking young people" with news the mainstream outlets wouldn't touch, and by its own account grew to millions of unique visitors per month.
That scale is a specific engineering problem. A publisher pushing out dozens of stories a day across eight cities needs templates editors never think about, pages fast enough to hold a social-referral audience, and an ad stack that earns on every page view. Coconuts also ran reader revenue: its Coco+ membership let readers name their own price, which meant a paywall, payments and member accounts inside the same WordPress install as the newsroom.
In 2021 Coconuts brought Chillybin in to rebuild the platform. Success meant editors in eight cities publishing without friction, revenue tools the commercial team could run, and a site that stayed up under real news traffic.
How we tackled it
One platform, eight cities
We built a custom, responsive HTML5 child theme on the Genesis Framework, structured so a single WordPress install could behave like eight local news sites. Every city got its own landing page, category and neighbourhood archives, with shared templates underneath for articles, tags, search, podcasts, events, jobs and Coconuts TV. Editors filed into one CMS; readers in Manila and Bangkok each saw their own front page. The discipline was in the CSS and JavaScript too: low DOM weight, no repeated styles, infinite scroll to keep readers moving through stories.
Revenue was part of the build, not an afterthought
An ad-funded newsroom lives or dies on inventory, so ad positioning was engineered into the theme, with custom fields controlling placements per city and per slot through Ad Inserter Pro rather than hard-coded templates. The Coco+ membership ran on Leaky Paywall with name-your-price pricing, Mailchimp sync for member newsletters, and custom registration and profile pages. When the commercial team later needed header bidding, outstream video or native placements wired in, the platform absorbed them without a rebuild.
Staying through the hard part
In late 2023, Coconuts Media consolidated the maintenance of all its properties (Coconuts, plus its Bangkok titles BK Magazine and Soimilk) with Chillybin. Weeks later, the publication announced it would cease publishing on 31 December 2023, after twelve years. A publication closing isn't a website closing. The archive stayed online and we kept hosting and maintaining it. Through 2024 and 2025 we remained the technical team behind Coconuts Media's surviving titles, migrating BK Magazine and Soimilk onto WordPress and running their ad operations.
What we delivered
Coconuts now exists as an archive, and that archive still runs on the theme we built. The coconuts.co back catalogue is browsable from 2013 to the farewell post. Before that, the build carried the network's peak-traffic era across eight cities without the website ever being the story, held its advertising and membership revenue in one place, and gave the editorial team templates they could run without a developer on call. For a body of journalism covering a decade of Southeast Asian city life, that permanence is the quiet final deliverable.
What we learned
Publishing platforms are judged on the days nothing goes wrong. A brochure site can tolerate a slow Tuesday; a newsroom pushing breaking stories to millions of readers can't. Building for editors (fast templates, predictable archives, ad slots that never need a developer) is why this work led on to BK Magazine, Soimilk and our other editorial builds.
A media title's lifespan and a media company's lifespan are different things. Coconuts closed; Coconuts Media kept operating, and the trust built on one title became a longer engagement across the stable.
