Closing Chapter; Crain Communications

After a short term “sabbatical” with Beachbody. I rejoined June 5^th, 2017 with the on demand side of the business. I stayed with them until the end of 2022 when I was again let go, as business was changing internally. Luckily friends, (whom previously were let go) had found a new role at a company based in Detroit. With their help I was able to secure a new role with Crain Communications as a “Principal Software Engineer, Content” in April of ’23.

Since joining I helped the company wrangle their small ¹. WordPress applications, migrating multiple business sites into one, transitioning many from different hosting environments, and even one Joomla site into their new “Crain” branded city brand site.

As of the beginning of March, I am no longer with Crain.

Over the course of my nearly two years their I had some great accomplishments, here are a few:

Migrations and acquisitions

• Migrate two WordPress apps, and a Joomla app into one new WordPress powered website.
  • Migrating MiBiz into GRBJ.
  • Migrating GRBJ into Crains Grand Rapids.
  • Migrate to our new Pagely service.
• Migrate Crain’s corporate site to Pagely.
• Help migrate Green Market Report after Crains acquisition.
  • Migrate to our new Pagely service.
• Move all applications into Composer managed PHP dependencies.
• Removing previously 3rd party tracked code from our new GitHub managed repos.
• Building a shared deployment GitHub Action workflow.
• Updated from their deprecated PHP versions (5.6, 7.2, and 7.4) too:
  • PHP 8.0 and initial migration to Pagely.
  • PHP 8.1 at the end of 2024.
  • PHP 8.2 in February of 2025.

Deployments

I don’t have the exact numbers on me anymore. But I know I was able to push out a lot of feature deployments while my team ranged from solo developer (just myself) to a team of three developers.

• CRAIN: 8 major version updates.
• CGR: 16 major version releases.
  • The largest being content paywalls in Q2 of ’23.
• GMR: 10 major releases.
  • The largest being content paywalls in Q4 of ’24.

Continuity and CI

The greatest task I put myself in charge of was managing the business functionally plugin as a shared service.

This entailed creating a “shared” WordPress repository, that was setup as a Composer package type wordpress-plugin. On composer install or update, our business functionally plugin would be available across all our application websites, and could now share code without needing to be duplicated.

Duplication was something I saw asked for a lot as different stakeholders for each service were asking for the same things. Things like analytics integration, content paywalls, global script registrations for 3rd party services, Google Ad Manager integrations, and others.

With a shared service repo, I was also able to put in place shared GitHub Action workflows to manage repeatable actions like creating our environment variables AKA .env file on deploy steps, running CI test suites like PHPCS and PHPStan rules, building our LESS, SASS or compressing JS files for deployments, and other things in a simple singular location.

Whats next?

While I don’t have anything lined up, I’ll be looking for my next role.

1. Out of their 28 branded businesses, only two we’re on WordPress, with one more being their corporate site.