We went on-site to work with the Storefront group, providing front-end development expertise and collaborating with Expedia’s top of the line in-house product, design, and development teams. The result is a lightning fast, responsive homepage that leverages the best technologies for progressive enhancement and client-side data persistence—and looks great across devices.

It’s always a pleasure to help a market leader provide a great user experience to their customers, and we couldn’t be happier to be part of their team.

Shared Learning Collaborative, a nonprofit dedicated to improving education through technology, found themselves with two separate sites and a new brand. They already had lots of help on the PR side, but they needed someone to figure out the logistics of the actual site merge and upgrade. Luckily, that’s exactly what we do.

From a beautiful design by Intentional Futures, we built a Drupal CMS combining the features of the two existing sites, with customizations to support access control to content for partners, developers, and the public—right on time for the group’s upcoming sponsorship of SXSWedu.

Foundry has some well-known clients, but we take equal pride in working with educational organizations, individuals, and causes believe in. We’re proud to help the Shared Learning Collaborative update their brand to inBloom.

Foundry does a substantial amount of work with WordPress. It’s by far the most popular combination blog/CMS for small websites, and frequently clients request it specifically or are already using it. And if not, then sometimes we recommend it based on clients’ business requirements, technical expertise, or other factors.

Recently we finished our first production deployment of WordPress on Heroku. Heroku presents an application hosting solution that has the performance and reliability of dedicated hosting, but relieves the client of the long-term obligation of maintaining one or more virtual private servers.

I’ll go into detail about why we chose Heroku and what challenges we faced deploying WordPress there in the near future. But before that, I want to answer another question: why WordPress?

Why not WordPress?

Because WordPress is terrible.

• It’s a monolithic application loaded with features that can’t be turned off but aren’t useful in every case, which increases the attack surface and memory footprint.
• It’s built on PHP, which has little to recommend it against more modern, disciplined interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, except perhaps that it is suitable for cheap shared hosting environments.
• Its separation of framework, application, configuration, and data is very poor. For instance, some configuration lives in a file in the filesystem and some lives in the database, and the database schema can sometimes change based on what plugins are being used and how they are configured. This makes data migration during major upgrades or for new deployments challenging.
• It’s slow, in part because it is undisciplined about how the database is accessed and because PHP applications must choose between speed and code organization.
• It is built with the expectation that the application can safely modify its own filesystem (for instance, uploading image files in subdirectories of the application, or caching data to disk in plugin subdirectories). This even extends to being able to update WordPress itself through WordPress’ own admin console, which sounds convenient but which has deleterious side-effects that make it unsuitable for multi-web server environments, where multiple servers need to have synchronized copies of the same framework and application code.
• It’s known to have significant security issues, which are exacerbated by deployments that allow the application to overwrite its own application code. One way to mitigate this is to deploy the application in such a way that it cannot modify its own filesystem (ensuring the webserver does not have suitable permissions etc.), but this is complex: features that rely on filesystem modification cannot be hidden and will appear broken if a user attempts to use them, and many plugins require certain directories to be writable in order to function.
• Its database schema changes during upgrades, but the specifics of how it changes during each upgrade are not well-documented. Because of this, automatic schema migrations can not be safely rolled back without also resorting to a database backup (costing the user all content and comments committed after the backup).
• Its technical documentation is uneven, and searching the web for information on common WordPress issues often exposes answers which are out-of-date or which make assumptions about the application’s environment.
• It is only compatible with MySQL, which among other things means that schema migrations for WordPress upgrades, plugin installation, etc. cannot be done inside a transaction.
• Its community-provided plugins are typically poorly or totally un-documented and are rarely verifiably functional on the latest version of the framework.

I could go on.

To summarize, WordPress is built on antiquated technologies, has substantial technical debt, and is not compatible with modern best practices on how to serve and scale web applications. It does everything, but it doesn’t do anything particularly well.

So, why WordPress?

My laundry list of technical issues above may make me out to be anti-WordPress, but we still use it. Why?

Primarily for three reasons: because the parts of the application that the client uses (the admin interface) are presentable, because the features cover a lot of bases, and because there aren’t many good alternatives.

All of the features built into WordPress, plus the breadth of plugins available, combine to serve most of the business requirements of our small clients.  Even though I complained about the “bloat” of WordPress in just the previous section, the fact that so many features are available is a plus in the end. WordPress is most suitable when used as a blog, but it is also a passable CMS (at least when compared to the thin ranks of modern non-PHP CMSes). It can even be converted partially or wholly into an e-commerce platform, although recently we’ve started encouraging clients to adopt Shopify instead of tacking on e-commerce to WordPress for most situations.

Although plugin support and quality is uneven, there is a WordPress plugin to address nearly every need. Even those that they are technically poor may be full of features that are useful to clients. And usually, technical issues with plugins are just a problem for the developer to solve, whereas once they are working they are a benefit to the user.

Some of the plugins we use frequently include:

• W3 Total Cache, which speeds up WordPress considerably for cache hits, at the cost of a dramatic increase in configuration complexity.
• WordPress SEO, which tailors WordPress to be in line with more-or-less up-to-date thinking on search engine optimization.
• WPtouch Pro, which renders acceptably styled pages for mobile and tablet devices with very little configuration.
• Disqus, which replaces the troubled and slow native WordPress comment system with a much more scalable, social media-friendly solution.
• Google Analytics for WordPress, which allows for highly granular customization of Google Analytics tracking from within WordPress.

Additionally, it’s at least minimally user-friendly for content producers. While the technical internals of WordPress are poorly documented, the documentation for user-facing parts of WordPress is not as bad, and WordPress is so widely used that it’s possible to get help for most common problems one way or another.

Perhaps for these reasons, some companies use WordPress for extremely high-traffic sites despite the technical challenges: for instance, the New York Times, CNN and Reuters (all three for blogs) and Gawker (for their main content, which is also essentially a collection of blogs).

What next?

Every time we have the opportunity, we explore options for specific clients other than WordPress, especially those running on modern frameworks such as Django or Rails, but usually we run into the same problems:

• The client may need a feature that is included in WordPress or available as a plugin, and is not available for other candidates. Even if it’s fairly minor, any feature that needs to be written from scratch will be expensive and time-consuming to implement on another platform.
• The client’s requirements may be vague or uncertain enough that we can’t risk selecting a platform that is less all-purpose than WordPress without running the risk of expensive custom implementation later on.
• The client may have stakeholders and content creators who are already familiar with WordPress, and the opportunity cost of selecting any other platform would therefore be higher.
• CMS, blog and combination CMS/blog alternatives to WordPress that run on modern, well-supported frameworks such as Django and Rails tend to be immature and not widely-used, so adopting them is a bit of a gamble, for both developers and end users.

At Foundry, we’ve often discussed adopting a competent modern alternative to WordPress, trying to build up technical knowledge on how to apply it, and contributing to the project to remedy deficiencies if possible. However, we’re still looking for a candidate that even comes close to being as broadly useful to our clients as WordPress.

In the meantime, we go to war with the CMS we have.

futuredraft is in the game of solving problems. Their deep experience with brand strategy, user and customer experience, product management, and design makes them an asset to the field and a boon to their clients.

Congratulations to Hans, Brian, and Chris! We look forward to collaborating with you.

Washington United for Marriage has made it incredibly easy for your company to endorse R 74. You can join the coalition and donate in just a few minutes.

We worked with FAS to adapt their designs, art, and ideas to develop an informative, portable app designed to educate users about common viruses, bacteria, and other toxins. Based on the trading card-style source material, we were able to make decisions to best leverage both the iOS and Android environments to provide the best experience for users across a variety of devices.

Foundry also built each app in its native environment (instead of developing in one and porting to the other), which means that the applications were developed and tested with code quality in mind, in line with our client’s commitment to rigorous standards.

The Bioagents Education app is now available in both the iTunes Store and Google Play for iPhones and Android devices, for free.

View Bioagents Education on iTunes Preview

View Bioagents Education on Google Play

It’s world-class clients like Whipple that make us happy to do what we do. Congratulations to her and the entire team!

To better meet Westward Leaning’s needs, we moved their site from Magento to Shopify to simplify managing the site, and worked with them to redesign some parts of the site to make browsing and shopping easier for customers. The end result puts the sunglasses, the people who wear them, and the charities they represent in the spotlight.

(And for the record, those frames are pretty universally flattering. We know because we tried them on, and as you can see, we’ve got quite the range of mugs.)

That’s why we were extra excited to see her in the news again, leading the American women’s rowing team to the 2012 London Olympics. Whipple will be joined by a team that includes five others gold medalists from 2008.

Foundry is proud of the diversity of our clients, and Mary Whipple is no exception. Congratulations to her and to all athletes attending the games!

If you’ve looked at any fitness club websites lately, you’ll find that they can be distractingly flashy and low on content. FitEvo wanted a site that matched their business model—no-frills, come-as-you-are fitness for everyone—but lacked the technical expertise and time to do it themselves.

Foundry worked with a designer and provided development, content, information architecture, and SEO muscle to create a low-fi, content-rich, mobile-friendly website that can easily grow as FitEvo’s coast-to-coast chain of clubs continues to expand. Whether you’re trying to decide which class to take, or you just need to check location hours on your phone, the new FitEvo site has you covered.