Celebrity Celebration

We have been working for some time on a Celebrity Publishing Platform (“Platform”, for confidentiality project naming is changed) project for one of our clients, BuzzMedia and I am happy to announce that it is finally seeing the light of … well, the LCD screens around the internet. Last week, we finalized its release and we couldn’t be more proud.

We created this Platform from the ground up, along with other useful tools for BuzzMedia over the past three years. To see this creature finally released into the wild was a proud day.

This time around, BuzzMedia needed a tool that could expedite publishing of new content that could handle the sheer number of celebrities they deal with on a daily basis.

It was a long series of fitting square pegs into round holes. The task of this project was to create a new software tool that could handle the load of BuzzMedia – which is far from your everyday publishing norm that platforms like WordPress are used to.

In the past, we have created new features from the ground up and which had later been implemented in core WordPress. There are features that were required for this project , that are still not part of the core platform, but we were able to create these features.

One of the most complicated features of this platform was allowing users to automatically be shared across all celebrity blogs using WordPress Network Mode and the main site. The main site is NOT on WordPress Network Mode, and is actually a completely separate install of regular WordPress.

This obstacle was difficult to overcome because of the way that site access is stored in the database. The short and long of this is we had to trick WordPress Network Mode into automatically copying all the permissions from the main site and use them for every site in Network Mode. It would be lengthy and complicated to explain in detail, but that is the basic idea.

Now, because every celebrity can’t be a brilliant developer and I can’t be a celebrity, we developed another feature into the Celebrity Publishing Platform that adds speed and ease to creating a new celebrity blog. We developed a custom WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style editor which will be used to quickly customize many aspects of the theme itself.

The goal was to reduce publishing time and automate as much of the deployment as possible. Think of it as a complete custom layer on top of WordPress that saves non-technical people a lot of time.

This Platform also includes all the features we have created for BuzzMedia over the past several years. Many of these features are administrative and editorial features. Some however are forward facing, like the unique endless gallery experience. These features were included because they are part of the BuzzMedia standard now.

All in all, this new product helps our valued customer achieve its goals and makes their editors lives easier. The first Celebrity Blog launch on this platform went smoothly. This product is a powerful new tool that will streamline professional Celebrity Blog site creation and management.