By continuing to use our website and services, you acknowledge that you have read, understood and agreed to our privacy policy.
closeTo say they have their hands full is to put it mildly. So when Roam contacted us about an engagement, their primary focus was on finding ways to streamline their web content creation and publishing process.
But while developing automations to make their workload less manual, we also noticed some infrastructure shortcomings that needed to be addressed.
Inadequate Infrastructure
Not only was Roam’s hosting solution inadequate for the
new direction they wanted to take things, but the lack
of a development/deployment pipeline and automated
backup system gave us cause for concern.
Complicated Third-Party Integration
For one particularly difficult automation, we needed to
generate PDF-based product catalogs out of content
stored in a WordPress website. From there, we had to
automate getting those catalogs to ISSUU, an online
digital publishing platform.
And, it’s a good thing we did!
Several months later, the hosting provider performed a hardware upgrade that wiped out Roam’s website, our automations and WordPress’ database. On top of that, the hosting provider had no way of their own to restore everything. Luckily, the infrastructure we’d built out earlier that year allowed us to quickly re-deploy to DigitalOcean, where we got everything back up and running in less than an hour, all without any data loss.
For the automated integration with ISSUU, we created a WordPress template that used custom queries to assemble product catalogs in HTML and CSS whenever content on the site changed. From there we wrote a server-side utility that automatically downloaded the HTML version of the catalog and converted it into a properly formatted PDF. The utility then combined the PDF with metadata and used ISSUU’s developer API to upload and publish the content for review. Finally, the utility alerted Roam whenever a new version of the catalog was waiting for their approval.
Client
Roam Agency
Project Summary
Automate repetitive tasks and implement maintenance, backup and
security strategies.
Biggest Difficulty
Develop complex solutions on inadequate infrastructure.
Main Technologies
Git, PHP, Python, WordPress