Campbell's products are sold in 120 countries. Brian led two efforts for the company: a corporate site its team fully controls, and an importer that keeps a multisite network stocked with recipes and products.
Campbell Soup Company: the brief
Campbell's uses its corporate site to connect with investors, publish press releases and more. The existing site ran on WordPress but limited what staff could change. Separately, thousands of recipes and products in Campbell's internal API needed to reach the right sites in a multisite network, automatically.
Corporate site and multisite recipe importer
- Corporate site. Homepage feature areas the communications team curates itself.
- Press releases. New releases arrive from Campbell's press API as drafts, ready for review.
- Brand map. An interactive world map of where each Campbell's brand is sold, made for investors and visitors.
- Importer plugin. A dashboard where staff design their own migrations and set how often they run.
- Smart syncing. Each run adds new items and refreshes changed ones based on modification time, with a nightly sync to designated network sites.
A corporate site the team controls
Designated members of Campbell's staff control the featured areas, which gives them flexibility in choosing what to highlight on the homepage. When a press release is issued, the automated feed pulls it into WordPress from the API that publishes it, ready to review and publish, so staff skip a manual step.
Campbell's is an international company with many associated brands. The interactive brand map gives investors and other visitors a cohesive, visual way to see where each brand is distributed around the world.
Inside the recipe and product importer
The importer moves thousands of recipes and products from Campbell's internal API into a WordPress Multisite network. A custom interface lets staff create and schedule migrations right from the dashboard. Content flows in on a schedule, so the public sites never wait on an upstream system.
Brian later presented large scale migrations he led, including the Campbell's work, at WordCamp Toronto 2016.
Why it mattered for Campbell's team
Campbell's staff own their content, and the network stays current without manual work.
WordPress Multisite stack
- WordPress
- WordPress Multisite
- Custom import plugin
- Press release API
Project leadership by Brian Messenlehner, AlphaWeb founder.
Related: Central Market: Gourmet Grocery Commerce on WooCommerce, Starbucks: A Barista Learning Platform on WordPress and WordPress Multisite Development: One Platform for Many Sites.
