Reality Sandwich is a popular portal for cutting edge thought, psychology, spirituality, and psychedelic culture with a substantial daily readership.

Re-thinking WordPress

Developing and re-designing Reality Sandwich has been long and ongoing process. We began by first doing high concept design on a re-iteration of the site’s functionality from the top down.

After settling on this, wireframes, and then concept designs were generated, including all aspects of artistic direction, from color pallets, to design memes.

In the process, we found that WordPress, the CMS of choice, didn’t support much of the Reddit-like functionality that was required. Spec sheets, detailing down the every database table, PHP and Javascript function required were generated, and then the help of Innuva, a mobile, web and IT solutions company based in Egypt, was contracted to execute on the set specifications.

Data Migration

A large portion of the project was dedicated to migrating thousands of articles from an antiquated Drupal Database, into the WordPress database. MySQL and PHP functions were coded with the help of Innuva, in order to port over all the data into the new system. This process was meticulous and took several weeks to test and perfect. The result was a series of automated MySQL Scripts which remapped the database tables from Drupal to WordPress, and PHP scripts which went through scrapping every image file and inserting it into the WordPress media library.

Maintenance and Ongoing Development

At the current state, RSV2 is still a work in progress, and required regular bug fixes and routine maintenance and security upgrades. Working with the RS editorial team, we are seeing several years in advance of where we’d like to continue developments, and I look forward to keep developing this site, which still has a lot of untapped potential.