When I started working for White Clarke Group I was maintaining their websites which had been built using Expression Engine and hosted on a Linux server on Microsoft Azure. There were a number of problems with the hosting server platform including the lack of reliable integration with Git/BitBucket and scalability. To address these issues I setup new Ubuntu cloud server instances with cloud databases and load balancers on Rackspace and migrated the sites on to them.
Then in 2016 they decided that they wanted to add multilingual functionality to their Expression Engine websites. Through testing multilingual modules for Expression Engine I discovered a number of problems with the codebase I had inherited. The website code was going to need a lot of reworking to get multilingual functionality to work correctly, so White Clarke Group to rebuild the sites using WordPress. This also provided us with the opportunity to convert the frontend CSS code to Twitter Bootstrap as the sites had been built using a bespoke CSS grid system that had no documentation. It had also proved hard trying to find other Expression Engine developers which added weight to the decision to move to WordPress.
To speed up the development process White Clarke Group hired a friend of mine, Elliot Taylor, to assist. We created a task list in Basecamp, agreed workflow using Git version control with the repositories on Bitbucket and got stuck into the coding.
During development we implemented some design and functionality changes and now the new WordPress multilingual sites are online.
Here are the technologies we used to develop these sites:
- Basecamp and Redmine for task management and tracking
- Bitbucket / Git for storing the code repositories and version control
- Ubuntu servers with cloud databases and load balancers on Rackspace for hosting
- Expression Engine
- WordPress
- WordPress Multilingual
- Twitter Bootstrap
- SASS
- Gulp.js running on Node.js to compile the SASS