Welcome to Evolve V2 — what's changed and why

Evolve has always been an argument as much as a masthead: journalism should not require permission from proprietors who confuse markets with mandates. The live site carried years of that argument inside WordPress seams that creaked — fine for a scrappy start, less fine when readers expect instant loads and frictionless ways to fund investigations.

Evolve V2 is deliberately smaller in scope than a migration manifesto. It is a pitch-quality rebuild — static-first pages, typographically calm reading, Stripe-native checkout for donations and subscriptions — so Tom Rogers can see how the editorial product feels when the plumbing stops arguing with the prose.

What changed is mostly invisible until it isn’t. Headlines sit on generous measure; body copy uses a serif tuned for long reads; navigation stays out of the way until you need it. What did not change is the posture — Evolve remains an independent shared-equity outlet biased against injustice and the polite euphemisms that keep it comfortable.

This prototype ships with seeded articles, not an archive transplant. That matters: migrations are emotional and logistical labour; demos should stay lightweight enough to iterate weekly. If a section feels wrong, we reshape it without dragging thousands of legacy URLs through the conversation prematurely.

The commercial heart is /support — one-off and monthly donations alongside a single supporter tier priced at £5/month. Stripe hosts card capture; we never pretend a donation button is “just” cosmetic when rent and freelancers are paid from it.

None of this commits Evolve to throwing away WordPress tomorrow. It commits us to proving that reader-funded scrutiny can look and behave like the serious press it already is — fast, legible, and unembarrassed about asking for money.

If you are reading this as a sceptical editor, good. Kick the tyres. If you are reading as a reader who kept Evolve solvent during thin months — thank you; this rebuild is partly a love letter to that stubborn habit of sending £10 when the headlines hurt.

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