This last week saw the release of the new ITSMA website (www.itsma.com). To the casual visitor, the site remains largely unchanged: a few style alterations here and there. But it’s the backend that got the major overhaul. Until a few months ago, ITSMA was a site comprising thousands of static pages and some fairly complex e-commerce functions. And as you might have guessed, it now lives within WordPress.It’s safe to say that with this and a couple of other recent projects, we have pushed the limits of what WP is meant to do. But in doing this, we’ve not only demonstrated that at it’s core WP is a fully capable CMS, we’ve also learned some very cool things as well (especially regarding the use of custom fields).
One complexity of this project was the amount of data required to migrate. While most of the pages were static HTML, much of the data actually was duplicated in a database, which we exported to spreadsheets to organize and then import into the MySQL database in WP. (When migrating data into WP, you’re not only pulling in the article content, you’re breaking apart the metadata and spreading that across related tables.) This activity was further complicated by the large number of categories and tags to be applied to each article, and also by the number of authors involved.
Another complexity was migrating the existing design templates to the new platform. If you’ve visitied the ITSMA site, you can see that it is an extremely tight and well-designed site (designed and built by the infinitely talented Maria Lindberg). Tearing those templates apart and rebuilding them with WP functionality inside them was an exhaustive chore.
You may have noticed my recent ranting on using WP on a Windows platform. That was inspired by this site. This is the only site currently in our roster that runs on IIS. So many complications and issues that generally are not a problem when running in a Linux environment. Then again, we’ve learned a lot and solved a lot of problems for next time.
In terms of e-commerce, we essentially have two platforms running here: content lives within the WP system, but we’ve left in place the Windows-based purchasing system (this was an extremely costly system to ITSMA and not something we wanted to rebuild, at least not in Phase I).
I have to thank my old CIO.com colleague Chris Koch for bringing me in on this project. I was excited to work with him again, and to see if WP could handle this heavy load (and it does, beautifully). I’m very grateful to the entire ITSMA team (Maria especially) for their support and patience in what turned out to be a project larger in scope than any of us expected.
