tyler

Dynamic Clinic Pages

Given the diversity of each clinic in their network, our team set out to create a flexible and easy-to-use dashboard implementation so that the client could focus more on content entry and spend less time worrying about clinic page consistency and formatting. This was especially important since most of the site’s content needed both English and Spanish versions.

As lead developer on this project, my primary concern for the clinic pages was to build streamlined, robust theme templates and dashboard views that met these requirements. Naturally, my team and I turned to Advanced Custom Fields Pro to bridge that gap. The core theme template included functionality to order and omit sections based on client preference for that clinic, and each individual section had its own template partial to keep the code tidy and modular.

Analytics, Design, SEO, & Other Requirements

I coordinated my team with several other teams so that we could provide the best possible final product. Integrations included Google Tag Manager, Yoast, Salesforce, Yext Answers, and many more other third-party tools and integrations

There is much, much more about this project that can be detailed here, such as custom insurance post types, custom blog types, an events manager, Pantheon…the list goes on and on. If you would like to know more, just ask!

Bespoke From the Ground-Up

This brand-new website was the result of due diligence in planning and making a solid foundation for the massive amount of information that needed to be presented. Planning started before I got hired at Pleth, and soon after my hire date I was tasked with making sure that their server environment was safe, secure, and robust enough to handle heavy traffic situations. A 3-tier VPC environment with auto-scaling capabilities was the solution.

The site’s base theme is Bootstrap, which ensured a great responsive experience. Custom templates were made for individual page content elements (Twig). Many new templates, views, content types, and taxonomies have been added by our team since the site launched. We have also incorporated other clinic homepages into the site and these domains are also routed through the load balancer with HTTPS termination.

Getting Everything Straight

When I took over D&D of this website, it was five years old. There were *Thirty Six* WordPress plugins installed on the site. Needless to say, it was running a tad bit sluggish. My first task was to clean this up a bit.

The client needed several landing pages developed, and when they needed them, they needed them very quickly. They also had to package up the fields and send them to their CRM. Using the Gravity Forms plugin (I’m a huge fan) and PHP, I was able to grab the submitted info from the form submission and package it into a JSON object, where it was then posted to their CRM’s API.

Email Image Hosting Through CDN

At this point, through many meetings and conversations where I recommended that they upgrade their setup, the client was starting to see the benefits of moving to a more robust system such as Drupal to meet their ever-scaling needs. They were also interested in having their own dedicated server for various reasons. One of those reasons was having a place to host images that a third-party graphic designer was making for their email campaigns. Since they were on a shared hosting environment, we needed to find an interim solution.

That solution came in the form of a string of AWS services. The graphic designer straight-up required that he have SFTP access to upload his images, and no other method would work for him. So, I delivered. A t3.nano EC2 instance was used as an intermediary between the designer and an S3 bucket, providing the interface desired. A CloudFront distribution was put in front of the S3 bucket to serve the files, and Route53 was used to give each image a more digestible URL.

The 10-Hour Challenge

Content was ready, assets were selected and made, and I was told to make both of these sister sites as fast as possible to maximize profit. Challenge accepted. I decided to go to work with the Genesis Framework and one of their awesome pre-built themes.

After deploying both staging sites, completely building out one and copying to the other to its environment, and then putting content and adjusting styles on the second site, the total clocked time was just about 6 hours after adjustments and reviews. There’s nothing too fancy about it, but there’s also some very clever CSS because my Project Manager decided that he wanted all of the interior page content separated into containers like it was in the mock-up. Since adjusting the theme would have taken forever, I decided to get creative with borders in order to give the illusion that the sections were separated. It still did great on screen readers and was fully responsive, and the PM was happy, so we did launch checks and put them into production.