SmartBlogs, the bloggy little brother of the venerable newsletter company SmartBrief, ran their sites on an absolutely enormous WordPress Multisite install. Being that SmartBlogs is essentially a very successful experiment, they’ve been working slightly seat-of-the-pantsy for the last few years. When Editor Doris Nhan contacted me, she needed a geek to go in and address the handful of bugs that had crept into the site that, on their own, were relatively minor, but had managed to scale in size with the rest of the site. Fixes for this site ran the gamut from finding unclosed tags in the loop to hacking core to introduce novel, if subtle, new features in WordPress thumbnail processing.
That was fun, but the real excitement came when they wanted to completely restructure the entire site, and go backwards from a Multisite to a single WordPress install. This required a bunch of things: several weeks of building an entirely new database by hand so as to preserve all of the data, meta-data relationships, and authors, building a location-aware theme to deliver different branding based on subject, exhaustively reprogramming all of their advertising code, and building a fleet of custom widget plugins to display all the new data we liberated for them.
“A great weight was lifted off my shoulders since I started working with Meredith. She is incredibly flexible, reliable and professional — I couldn’t have asked for better. Mer goes above and beyond what I would have expected from a freelance developer to make sure that I’m happy and comfortable with any changes. What would have been an otherwise difficult and stressful redesign process has been a dreamy breeze.” — Doris Nhan