Ghost, Hugo, Next.js, a hand-rolled static site — most publishing stacks are brilliant at articles and hopeless at minute-by-minute. OnCue fixes that without touching your stack: it runs as a self-contained live engine on a subdomain you own, and your team never sees a CMS at all. They just post from Slack.
No migration · No rebuild · Your main site stays exactly as it is
Static builds, deploy pipelines, and editorial workflows are exactly right for articles — and exactly wrong for the 40 updates an hour a live story demands.
On a static or Jamstack site, every update means a build and a deploy. Live coverage at that cadence isn't coverage — it's a queue.
Even where the CMS can keep up, your people in the field aren't logging into an admin panel from a phone in a crowd. So the updates go to social instead — someone else's page, someone else's audience.
Hosted liveblog SaaS works, but the archive, the traffic, and the reader data live on their infrastructure, at their subscription price, for as long as they exist.
OnCue is a WordPress plugin, but in this setup WordPress isn't your CMS — it's an appliance. A minimal install whose only job is running live coverage, parked on a subdomain. Nobody writes in it, and your main site never changes.
Spin up a small WordPress install at live.yourbrand.com — any $6 host can run it — activate OnCue, and match the reader's fonts and colors to your brand. That's the whole footprint.
Link your Slack channel, Telegram group, or a plain SMS number. Each contributor connects their identity once, so every update carries a real byline.
When news breaks, add one link or banner on your Ghost site pointing to the live page. Readers land on your subdomain, your brand, your analytics — updating in real time with polls and cited AI highlights.
Embed the standout moments — or the full live stream — into your Ghost pages with a copy-paste snippet that works anywhere HTML does. When it's over, a citable, crawlable archive stays live on your domain.
This is the idea that makes the whole setup work: contributors never need the CMS — any CMS — because the chat apps on their phones are the writing surface.
A liveblog update is a Slack message. A photo from the floor is a Telegram photo. Nobody learns a tool on deadline, because there's no tool to learn — the muscle memory already exists.
A launch event with spotty Wi-Fi, a courthouse hallway, a conference floor: chat apps are built for exactly these conditions, and SMS posts with no data connection at all.
Freelancers, stringers, the exec on the road — anyone you invite to the channel can feed the coverage under their own byline, and an approval gate can hold anything you haven't cleared. An open channel never means an open mic.
Coordination and publishing happen in the same window: post to publish, start a message with // to talk without publishing, edit the message to correct the record. The liveblog is just the channel, made public and permanent.
The live page inherits your typography and colors, sits on your subdomain, and carries everything OnCue does — updates appearing in real time, inline polls, cited AI highlights for latecomers, share cards for every moment, even sponsor slots if you sell them. Search engines can crawl and cite every update, and every reader is counted on your own server. No SaaS badge, no rented URL, no reader data flowing anywhere but to you.
The live-engine setup is deliberately simple, and it has edges. Here's where it shines and what to know going in.
One subdomain, one afternoon of setup, and the next time news breaks your team covers it live — from the chat window they already have open.