Standing up Three New Magento Sites

I met some great people during this project, and learned some valuable lessons.

The scope of work consisted of scraping content from the sunsetting Skagen website, creating new visual assets and requisitioning new assets from the digital imaging department. I consulted with Magento corporate on how to make their e-commerce engine work with our process, and created a workflow whereby Magento would work as a CMS. I worked with translations.com to translate all content into UK English and German, built all blocks, widgets, and a not insignificant amount of code. After which I tested, iterated, wrote documentation and deployed hotfixes and just-in-time maintenance throughout the hypercare period.

There were several hurdles to overcome, most notably that a content management system allows you to schedule content, preferably with a rich set of component-based building tools. In short, a content management system allows you to manage content. Magento, at the time, was not equipped for this. They'd recently purchased Bluefoot CMS and integrated it, which allowed for a fair amount of component and pattern-based content creation. However, the use of Bluefoot prohibited scheduling content, meaning that whoever builds the pages would send the pages live immediately upon hitting 'save'. Not ideal, as content needs to be built, tested, approved, and sent live at a very specific time.

I created a workflow to enable the content production team to do that. Ask me what it is, I'll tell you. I'm not the only one who discovered that workaround for Magento 2.X, and it has limited utility, now that Adobe purchased Magento. But, it was good.

And I wrote documentation about it.