Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe

Website: https://www.westcoastblacktheatre.org/

Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe (WBTT) is a performance group who promotes and celebrates African American history and culture.

Scenario

WBTT was looking for a beautiful WordPress website powered by their Performance Calendar.

Technology Stack

• WordPress (Gutenberg) for the backend
• DDEV for local development
• Timber for templating
• Sass, ES6, Vite for the frontend
• Vite for the build tool

Integrations

• Salesforce Events - Synced events into their Performance Calendar

The most pivotal piece of their website was the Performance Calendar. I created a custom integration with their public Salesforce events site that collected information for productions such as:

• Title
• Description
• Featured Image
• Performance Dates

These were all synced to custom ACF fields along with The Events Calendar. We then offered the client additional fields, such as duration, category, etc to further enhance the performance detail pages.

It was especially challenging given how The Events Calendar recently moved away from typical wp_postmeta data storage to unique tables for their plugin. This mean plugins like WP All Import were almost useless.

I ended up creating a custom script to read their public API endpoint and then synced it via The Events Calendar's new ORM.

Gutenberg

I will be the first to say that I am not a fan of Gutenberg, largely due to the fact that it is an accessibility nightmare.

For development, I integrated Vite with DDEV for a fantastic development experience.

We paired Timber with ACF to create custom blocks that worked nicely in the editor.