ESPN Media Zone

I was apart if the re-launch of ESPN Mediazone.  ESPN helmed the restyle of its Mediazone asset which supports press and media inquiries.  The site needed functionality changes and I was brought on board to handle development.

The existing site had been using add-on functionality to manage associations between different types of content, but the client wanted to move away from this dependency and leverage native taxonomy functionality for content associations.  Using a native system would better insure future scalability, compatibility, and support, as the specific plugin they had been using was only minimally maintained.  There was no established migration path from the existing functionality to taxonomy, so I created a custom tool. Our solution involved creating and populating custom taxonomies for these relationships, functionality to run through the existing content associations based on input parameters and reassign the relationships using the native taxonomy system, and some functions to be used in theming to properly grab the target content from the associated taxonomy terms.

I also worked with the theme implementation. Part of the theme revamp involved porting some old customizations from their previous theme. A straight port of these customizations proved problematic, so I identified the custom functionality in the old theme and broke it out into a custom plugin.  This was also in-line with best-practices, as any functionality that is not about site theming is better suited to a custom plugin than inclusion in a theme layer.