Sportsnet / Rogers: Enterprise WordPress Theme
Enterprise WordPress theme development for Canada's national sports broadcasting network - built to Rogers...
REtipster.com is a high-volume editorial platform for land investors and real estate entrepreneurs, run by Seth Williams. Hundreds of articles, course content, a paid community, a content team that publishes constantly. I built the custom WordPress theme - twice.
The first version was 2018. ACF flexible content for the homepage, AJAX post filtering on archives, custom post types for Testimonials and Courses. The architecture was built around the publishing patterns Seth's team actually used, not what a demo looked like.
Then I came back in 2021 for version two.
That's the part worth explaining. Most WordPress theme engagements are a sprint: build it, hand it over, done. A client coming back three years later with a list of specific additions means the first version was good enough to build on - and that the developer understood the editorial operation well enough to be trusted with the next layer. The v2 additions came directly from three years of publishing. Seth's team had been using v1 every day. They knew exactly what was missing.
The shortcode library addresses a specific content operations problem. A team building hundreds of articles accumulates patterns they produce repeatedly: landing page components, legal disclaimers, accordion FAQs, CTA blocks. Without a shortcode library, editors write HTML by hand or format things inconsistently. The TinyMCE toolbar plugin adds a one-click button inside the visual editor. No HTML, no syntax to remember, no switching to the text editor.
Post view tracking - page views as post meta - sounds like an analytics feature but it's an editorial curation tool. REtipster's "popular articles" sidebar is based on actual readership data, not publication date. That's a different kind of recommendation: one that reflects what readers choose to read.
I've worked with editorial operations at Canadaland and NOW Magazine. I've co-organised WordCamp Toronto - as lead organiser in 2016 - and I understand what high-volume WordPress publishing actually requires at the codebase level. The REtipster engagement ran three years because the architecture was built for the editorial workflow, not for the initial demo.