WordPress Multisite & Events Platform

At Lion Interactive, I led the development of a WordPress multisite for the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It turned into one of my longest client relationships—the system's still running in production over five years later.

The Challenge

The Asian Art Museum needed a web platform that could handle multiple interconnected sites—exhibitions, events, educational programs, general museum information. Their old system made it hard for staff to manage recurring events, cross-promote content between sections, and give visitors a good way to search across everything.

The museum runs dozens of events every month. Gallery talks, film screenings, workshops, all kinds of things. A lot of them recur on complex schedules—first Tuesday of every month, every other Wednesday, that sort of thing.

My Role

I was the primary front-end and CMS developer for the entire multisite, working under my lead developer. I built every component across all six interconnected subsites and configured the CMS settings to keep everything consistent while letting each section have its own identity.

The big technical challenge was the events system. I designed and built it from scratch using the RRULE (recurrence rule) specification. I created a WordPress admin interface that let staff schedule complex recurring events—weekly tours, monthly lectures, seasonal programs—and stored everything in custom MySQL tables for better performance.

I also integrated Algolia search across the entire multisite so visitors could quickly find what they were looking for—current exhibitions, upcoming events, educational resources, whatever.

On the technical side, I architected the WordPress multisite infrastructure, built that custom events system with its admin interface, created responsive and accessible components with jQuery interactions, and designed CSS transitions and animations throughout. Made sure everything worked across browsers and devices.

The Result

After we launched, I stuck around. I maintained and enhanced the site for several years, adding features and making improvements based on how people actually used it. That long-term relationship let me refine things iteratively and keep the system working as the museum's needs changed.

The site's been in production for over five years now. The custom events system has handled thousands of events, and the multisite architecture has scaled with the museum's growing digital presence. It's one of my proudest projects—a complex technical system that genuinely improved how the museum connects with its visitors.