I was responsible for all back-end and front-end development.
As a Disney fan, I met Lou through his podcast. I offered to help him with some development and his site at the time was based in Joomla. I made a few suggestions such as creating a video landing page that would consume his youtube channel and keep people on his site instead of pushing them away to view more videos. With these initial conversations a relationship was forged and I built a few Joomla modules for him.
Not at all happy with Joomla, Lou really wanted to move his site to WordPress for its ease of use CMS system, blogging structure and ecosystem of plugins. For the move I wrote several php scripts that exported his content, categories and authors from Joomla and imported them into WordPress keeping his tag, category and author relationships in place. In all we moved about 1200 pages of content. Moving to WordPress also afforded us a chance to re write his skin from scratch creating new CSS, cleaning up images and building a more flexible skin that takes advantage of more real estate on the screen in width expanding the width by almost 100 pixels. With the skin update, we also updated the forums skin to match that of the new WordPress skin to keep a consitent look and feel.
For WordPress I installed and configured various plugins including caching, backup, wp-ecommerce (also tried Shopp for a while), and built several custom plugins. At the server level I built and configured a few timed scripts that also backup the content data and export and backup the raw database to remote locations for redundancy.
Join me and 4 other tech nuts and disney geeks talk about the small little space (ok, it’s actually quite large) where Disney and Technology meet.