The Secret

The Secret is a series of books and other media designed to show how positivity and and a joyous outlook on life can lead to positive results. Their website showcases thousands of stories submitted by readers that help to illustrate the core values of the series.

Their old site used a custom database that was proving to be too difficult to manage, and it wasn't flexible enough to adapt to future needs. It was time to refresh the look and feel of their site, and they decided to migrate to WordPress. But they faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: how to get over 27,000 user-submitted stories into their new site?

That's when we got the call. To complete the project, we use standard WordPress functionality to architect the data structures, and wrote test cases and proofs of concept to ensure all of their needs were met. We fully documented the data structures in the source database (over 27,000 records and each record having up to 24 fields) to identify corner cases and validity tests. Then we wrote a standalone program to do the database conversion, because no off-the-shelf offering could handle the complexity of the original database. This program read in the source database line-by-line, validated what it found on-the-fly, and injected the data directly into the WordPress database.

This was a huge undertaking and the final process took many hours to run, but the result was a streamlined, validated database ready for the future plans for the site.

Note that my contribution to this project was all behind the scenes so we don't have any designs to show...except one so the page isn't empty!