This is what the Guardian does too. Their frontend is open-source: https://github.com/guardian/frontend
In Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.comguardian
frontend
Scala2013–2021
guardian / frontend
frontend
The Guardian DotCom.
18Distinct people
20Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Guardian DotCom.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year20 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-10-01 14:19:55 UTC to 2021-03-15 06:22:45 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Frontend
The backend of the Guardian website frontend.
For everybody who engages with our journalism, theguardian.com is an industry-best news website that is fast, accessible and easy to use. Unlike other ways of developing products, ours puts the audience first.
Frontend is a set of Play Framework 2 Scala applications. It is built in two parts, using make for the client side asset build and SBT for the Play Framework backend.
Frontend's responsibility is to build JSON to pass to the modern rendering service, Dotcom Rendering.
Core Development Principles (lines in the sand)
These principles apply to all requests on www.theguardian.com and api.nextgen.guardianapps.co.uk (our Ajax URL)
Every request can be cached and has an appropriate Cache-Control header set.
Each request may only perform one I/O operation on the backend. (you cannot make two calls to the content API or any other 3rd party)
The average response time of any endpoint is less than 500ms.
Requests that take longer than two seconds will be terminated.
Documentation
All documentation notes and useful items can be found in the docs folder.
New developers
Welcome! How to set up and run frontend.
To get set up, please follow the installation guide.
Fixes for common problems can be found here.
Please read the development tips document to learn about more about development process.
For our deployment process, see how to deploy.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
20 sourcesThe Guardian website, whilst not perfect according to the standards of the article and some other posts, is very performant. They have ads and other dynamic content, but load is deferred on this stuff and wrapped properly to avoid reflow, so the entirety of the article text is immediately readable. Just for interest, see also their tech blog [0] and their entire frontend on GitHub [1].
I can ignore ads, but what I find incredible on major (insert news/tech/whatever here) sites is the reflow from not properly reserving space for both ads and lazyloaded images. The following seems particularly to be a problem on mobile and in apps like Apple News: load a page, scroll to the meat of the article, then experience 1, 2, 3 page jumps as stuff loads in above your scroll position.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog
[1] https:
Read the rest
Like The Guardian? https://github.com/guardian/frontend
In Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?The blame has it: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/commit/9194aa952c93b3fe... by https://www.kaelig.fr/
In Source for theguardian.comThough I'll not make any judgement towards "prevent access", the main license file[0] does state:
> All fonts are the property of Schwartzco, Inc., t/a Commercial Type (https://commercialtype.com/), and may not be reproduced without permission.
As a side tangent, it constantly surprises me how deep the creative industries manage to sink their claws into IP and licensing. I don't understand how artistic commissions manage to hold onto ownership. If I told my a prospective client that the websites they'd be paying me to build would forever more be —essentially— mine, they'd fire me pretty quickly. Same goes for most work product with employers.
The Guardian commissioned these faces. Why would they accept such a crappy license?
[0]: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/LICENSE
In Source for theguardian.comThe docs include a recipe for Breton crêpes. :)
[1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/docs/99-arc...
In Source for theguardian.comIANAL, but this seems to collide with their EULA with Commercial Type [1], since third party hosting of the font files is "strictly prohibited" and the font files are in fact all available in the repo, which certainly doesn't sound like "reasonable effort to prevent access/use by unlicensed parties".
[1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/88cfa609c73545085c...
In Source for theguardian.comThe front end of guardian.com is open source
6 points · Open discussionThe Guardian front end source code
2 points · Open discussionTypically there'll be a CMS flag available to powerful users (editors). That's how it works at the Guardian.
It sets a boolean (shouldHideAdverts) in our content API[0], which we use in templates[1] to suppress commercial logic.
There are obvious business reasons for this. It's common for it not to be in the advertiser or reader's interest to show commercial messages against some content.
[0] http://content.guardianapis.com/world/live/2015/mar/24/germa...
[1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/4cb7e07c15a03568c2...
In How the New York Times keeps tragedies ad-free> Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports
> this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS
The Content API [1] is the heart of the beast - it takes input from our various content systems, including those involved in the production of the paper, and makes it available to frontends in a simple shared format. The CMS responsible for this piece treats content as an ordered list of entities of various types (text, video, quote, etc.). The article leverages a new (to us) pattern called layout hinting. Each entity is given a semantic value, like "narrative" or "auxilliary" which describes its relation to overall story. The rendered templates are then free to play with those however they choose.
> what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on
> one page/sectio
Read the rest
n etc?
I couldn't answer that one confidently, but you can always go and have a look at the source [2].
> Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time
> on Guardian stuff?
I'm the product guy for content pages on the site [3].
--
[1] http://guardian.github.io/content-api-docs/index.html
[2] https://github.com/guardian/frontend
[3] http://gu.com/humans.txt
See for yourself - https://github.com/guardian/frontend
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