One of the earliest sites Hop Studios was hired to manage was the Western Knight Center, an organization that offered training to professional journalists in a wide variety of subjects.
The WKC site used ExpressionEngine version 1.0 beta, if I remember correctly, and we had to do all sorts of PHP craziness and custom database development to make it handle the relational data of the training programs, the speakers, the attendees, the calendar, and the application process. There were approximately 4000 lines of PHP code needed, and an entire admin system was built to handle some of the site’s functionality.
Five years later, the Western Knight Center relaunched as the Knight New Media Center, with a specific focus on content and professional growth training for journalists working on multi-platforms. They needed a new site for a fresh start, but that site needed much of the underlying functionality that existed on the WKC.
And once again, we decided on ExpressionEngine to manage the site’s content. This time, however, the amount of custom PHP code is probably only 150 lines, and there has been no custom database programming needed.
It’s really amazing to see how much the tool has changed to help us do our jobs. And it’s also quite interesting for us to compare how much time and effort and custom development was necessary to do a site five years ago, compare to doing it now.
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