Running Hyperlocal French News Sites Without a Newsroom

Description and use

A PHP platform aggregates public data for small French towns, automatically generating news with source citations and integrating weather and fuel prices via open APIs.

Problem

Small French towns lack dedicated local newspapers, leaving essential information scattered across PDFs, paywalled archives, and Facebook groups.

Outcome

The platform delivers up‑to‑date local news for five towns using a single codebase, reducing maintenance overhead and ensuring transparency through visible source citations.

Workflow

• 1. Configure town-specific settings (name, department, coordinates, category templates).
• 2. Ingest public sources: town hall bulletins, prefecture announcements, open government feeds.
• 3. Generate articles from templates, attaching source citations.
• 4. Integrate live widgets: Open‑Meteo for weather and data.economie.gouv.fr for fuel prices, refreshing on a schedule.
• 5. Produce a hybrid sitemap: normal URLs for pages and <news:news> tags for recent articles.
• 6. Deploy the same codebase for multiple towns, adjusting config per town.

Evidence

We built a small PHP platform to pull that information back into one place, town by town, and dignes-infos.fr is one of the sites running on it.

Source

The articles are compiled automatically from public sources, and the site says so on every page.

Source

Two widgets forced us to integrate with real government APIs instead of shipping static placeholder data: a weather panel (Open‑Meteo) and a fuel‑price panel built on top of data.economie.gouv.fr.

Source

Google's news sitemap protocol wants a dedicated <news:news> feed, separate from a normal sitemap, listing only articles published in roughly the last two days.

Source

The same codebase also powers sites for Aubenas, Manosque, Gap and Aurillac.

Source