skillsoft
Skillsoft
It was the most complex project I'd taken on up to that point, at Networks That Matter, now EpicDevs. The screenshots are from that era: Skillsoft's current site isn't this work anymore.
- My role
- Team lead and main dev. Architect of the importer.
- Stack
- WordPress, PHP
(enlarge) The starting point
The catalog lived in giant XML files generated by internal systems, and each team used them for its own purpose, so changing their structure wasn't an option. Migrating once wasn't enough: the XML came back every cycle.
What we did
Accepting the source as it was
We considered moving to spreadsheets, but the product team already generated XML. We decided to adapt to that format and not ask anyone to change anything.
An identity that survives changes
At first I built the slugs from the title, and any editorial tweak caused conflicts. So I combined the XML ID with the title: readable URLs and a stable key.
(enlarge) One course, one record
The same course appeared in several series. The parser unifies it by its code and accumulates its parents, instead of creating copies.
(enlarge) Testing before publishing
Each cycle started from a copy of production: we imported, marketing validated on staging, and only then did we go live, coordinating an editing window.
(enlarge) By the numbers
- Between ~4,900 and ~5,900 courses per export
- More than 4,000 redirects from old URLs
- 4 XML files and 1 API as sources