Custom Wordpress Theme

When Vancouver Aquarium needed a tool to raise Ocean Awareness, they approached the Engine Team. There was a need for a system that would allow a great deal of freedom to publish stories that would communicate their purpose through several unique interactive experiences.

My role was as Lead Wordpress Developer. At that time, Wordpress was our go to CMS, since it provides a very user friendly way to maintain and manage content. Stories could be published by a team of authors, categorized accordingly, and could be scheduled for future releases.

Each story needed a great deal of freedom. The UX and Design teams goals were very lofty. A story could be comprised of several different types of content. While overall, each story was a full page slideshow experience, each slide could consist of a custom quiz, a full page video, a long form story, a promotional driver and more. The backend needed to be built in a way to allow for this freedom. We selected Advanced Custom Fields, which enabled us to stretch the power of the Wordpress editor. In addition to the fully immersive stories, the site also needed a home for its blog, initiatives and drivers to donate.

For smooth deployments, we selected Media Temple as our host and integrated Git Flow and Deploy Bot to automatically push stage / production releases.