The Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra is an amazing 40 year old community orchestra in Scarborough, Ontario. Once an independent city, Scarborough was annexed to Toronto by provincial decree in the 1990’s, but maintains an independent identity. Developing a new website for the orchestra was a considerable challenge due to some years of neglect of their prior site. The site was built on a child them of a deprecated them and much of it’s architecture was dependent on premium plugins with expired licenses. No wonder the staff of the orchestra was reporting that the site was balky and the simplist posts would encounter difficuties.
Unravelling the problems, it came to light that the site had been developed by a small local communications business that had, for the most part given up on web design. Once again, no one in the organization had really noticed but simply carried on. I was reminded of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again. In the book the character talks about how neglecting a dripping tap erodes your quality of life over time. Like a dripping tap, the problems with the website were affected every level and aspect of the organizations work
Organizing the orcestra’s many videos was one of the challenges with this build. Originally I built video portfolios as pictured here, but, given some recent changes in Google Search Console, I am transitioning the sit over to a video custom post type to have only one video on a post. Using a custom taxonomy, the videos are aggregated on archive pages.
Another challenge was setting up a self-hosted ticketing system. In this case we used The Event Calendar and Event Ticets from Modern Tribe.
