Talent Stacker WordPress Development

More Than a Website Redesign

Talent Stacker is a Salesforce training and career community founded by Bradley Rice. Their content, education, training, and community have helped thousands of people reskill and pursue careers within the Salesforce ecosystem.

My work with Talent Stacker has spanned multiple projects across two connected WordPress websites.

One is the public-facing marketing and content site. The other is a members-only platform containing courses, community features, dashboards, and other functionality for Talent Stacker customers.

Rather than one traditional website project, the relationship has been an ongoing process of simplifying, stabilizing, rebuilding, and extending a growing digital platform.

Bringing the Marketing Site Back to WordPress

Before we started working together, Talent Stacker’s main marketing website had been moved from WordPress to a custom PHP platform.

While technically capable, the new setup created a problem for the internal team. Tasks that should have been routine marketing work, such as creating landing pages, publishing articles, or experimenting with layouts, increasingly required development.

An earlier WordPress version of the site still existed on a development server.

The first major initiative was figuring out how to bring it back.

That required reviewing both versions of the site, updating the archived WordPress installation, mapping content that had been created on the newer platform, and bringing the two back into sync before relaunching WordPress as the primary marketing site.

Simplifying a Complex Two-Site System

The more complicated work involved understanding how the marketing site and member platform communicated with each other.

I audited the existing stack and worked through more than 10,000 lines of custom PHP and JavaScript to map how purchases, accounts, user data, and functionality moved between the two websites.

From there, the goal wasn’t to add more custom code.

It was to identify where we could achieve the same business outcome with a simpler, more maintainable system.

That included rebuilding the product and checkout process using Easy Digital Downloads and improving the journey between purchasing on the public site and accessing the members-only platform.

Building As the Business Evolves

Since the original migration and stabilization work, I’ve continued designing and developing new functionality across both websites.

Major projects have included:

• A new product and checkout process
• A public Media Center for articles, videos, and podcasts
• A redesigned member dashboard
• Simplification of the membership platform
• Removal of unnecessary premium plugins and dependencies
• Ongoing performance, security, and stability work
• New marketing pages and features
• A WordPress-based content planning and approval workflow
• A custom Salesforce practice quiz system

The content workflow gives the Talent Stacker team and its collaborators a structured process for moving content from planning through production, review, approval, and publishing directly inside WordPress.

I also developed a custom WordPress plugin that lets their team manage banks of Salesforce questions and answers and publish free timed, graded practice quizzes for visitors without requiring an account.

Building for Maintainability

One of the recurring goals across my work with Talent Stacker has been reducing unnecessary complexity.

The solution isn’t always another plugin, another integration, or another layer of custom code. Sometimes the more valuable work is understanding a complicated system well enough to safely remove things.

The result is a continually growing marketing platform on one side and a smoother, more stable member experience on the other, with less dependence on unnecessary third-party premium plugins.

I continue to support both websites with ongoing development, security, performance work, and new functionality as Talent Stacker’s business and platform evolve.