Jared Novak presented How we Built 17,170,200 Websites in 6 Months at WordCamp Providence. I was sure to attend this session as I would be hard-pressed to create 10 websites in that time span. How did he do it?
Novak is a partner with Upstatement. Their client, RandomHouse wanted to create a website for each book that was published. The challenge was that they publish about 15,000 books per year; ~41 books per day.
So, now we know that the 17,170,200 mentioned in the title of the session is the possible number of websites that could have been built, not the actual number of websites that were built, with the solution that Upstatement provided RandomHouse.
Novak admitted that he likes to, “make things that make things”, so he decided to create a tool that would help RandomHouse roll out a website per book on their own.
Upstatement used the Twig template engine and created Timber as the interface for hooking WordPress and Twig. Upstatement created different frameworks (content blocks) – one column, two columns, sidebars/no sidebars that RandomHouse could choose to include/not include in a website in order to make each book’s design unique.
Timber is available on gitHub.