 Hello Sam, it's such a pleasure for me to meet you at your camp Brighton and to know something about your Bretman's side story, how have you gotten involved in your personal work at all? Hi there, well, yeah it was nice to meet you there too as well, I really enjoyed the work camp. Yeah, so I've been working with WordPress for I would say around 12 years, maybe a bit longer. And I've been the head of technology here at SNAP Media for around 10 years since we were a small startup. Now we have around 30 or 40 employees working for us. So it's been quite a journey and we're a sports company, so sports media. A lot of that centers around blogging, hence the sort of heavy involvement with WordPress. So we're basically a digital media company, we reach around 30 million sports fans every month. And we pretty much position ourselves that we connect sports fans with brands. So we have a large audience and we work with brands to get them in front of that sports audience. So do you do that with all of the WordPress stuff to say? Well for a long time it had been just with WordPress, so I've had experience of multi-site for previous projects where multi-site was still in its very early days. But more recently we've done a couple of interesting projects with multi-site since the beginning of this year. So I'm going to tell you about one of those projects. Do you have some specific projects on your mind that you would like to share about it? What was the project like? Objectives? Sure. So the main project I wanted to talk about today was the Sports Predict a Game that we built based on WordPress multi-site. So this is a game for football fans where they can predict the scores and the outcomes of every football match and they will score points when they get the result correct and they score points when they get the correct outcome of the game so whether it was a win or a draw or that type of thing. And yeah I mean it's been quite a big project but it relates quite a lot to your presentation at WordCamp because it's really that software as a service type of setup where it's a white label product and then using multi-site we can roll out a site per client and brand it individually for them. So when did you sell your product? Well we started this in the WordCamp in the summer and now we're continuing for the Premier League season this year so for the World Cup one the first client to come on board was a big pan-European network of TV channels. They have seven channels in six different countries and five different languages so they're quite a big and challenging client for the first use of the white label product and then we also have a couple of clients here in the UK as well using the same technology. What kind of software do they get? What they get is essentially the game itself so the prediction game which lists all the football matches and allows people to make their user signs in, registers and then they can predict on the games. The user can also create mini-leagues where they invite friends, family, colleagues and things to join in the game and play with them. Exactly like that type of thing where they can play amongst themselves so they're also competing against every other user who's playing the game but they can also compete individually against each other in a smaller league as well and then the client also has options around different game mechanics so they can choose, first of all, which football competition they want to make with the game centre around so it would be the domestic league of that country or the World Cup or Champions League, that type of thing and then they can also choose a structure for how they want to award prizes so some clients have done things where they choose streaks of eight games and if a user was to predict correctly on all eight of those games they win the prize and there's also things like prizes for monthly and weekly leagues as well so it depends on the client how they want partly their budget for prizes whether they've got hundreds of thousands of Euros or just a smaller amount of money and things like that the type of company they are and then the game mechanic that they decide on depends on how they want to promote the game What were the specific reasons to choose what prize not to side? Well, I guess the sort of requirements for the minimal viable product were beyond the game mechanics itself where things like the user needs to be able to log in and register we need to be able to integrate a single sign on so for example, if someone has an account with one of these TV channels they can sign in through their existing account we use something like open north to authenticate their user on our side it needed to be able to be branded to their client it also needed to be translated into different languages which WordPress does very well being able to set locality, time zone, that type of thing and also we needed the ability to add extra pages that weren't part of the game itself things like an FAQ, game rules, contact arts, that type of thing so WordPress has all of those functionalities built in so WordPress for us was an obvious choice it's also a technology we're very comfortable using and have been using for a long time so we're very familiar and happy to use it Multisite specifically was really because it's a white label product that we wanted to be able to roll out for multiple clients every time a new client joins we can spin up a new site for them, we can brand it for them and we can also translate it into their language set it up so that all the times and everything relate to their time zone so Multisite seemed like a really good choice for that so why did I get that right when a new client comes to you and you prepare a new sub-domain for him, auto-level domain Exactly, yes I made branding according to his guidelines and gave him instance for his players, for users Exactly, yes, so for example the company would approach us for the game and they have some sort of campaign and wants to run around it whether they're monetizing it through advertising or sponsorship or that type of thing so yeah, then we would spin up a new site within our Multisite environment all the game mechanics and everything is instantly available we can set some options for that client so we can set options like the competition that they want to, the football competition they want to follow stuff around the prizes and game mechanics and then we can also set up things like their branding so branded header and footer for the site advertising banners for the site even down to things like when we send automated emails to each user telling them how many points they've scored that week and things we can include client branding in those email templates and things as well It sounds very interesting but have you met any obstacles while developing such kind of project with Multisite? Well yeah, obviously with a big project like that there's always going to be some obstacles Luckily for us not many of them really related to Multisite specifically as you know, as a developer you always face problems trying to code something new and something big like that but there was a couple of things that related to Multisite specifically so a couple of examples is Cron so obviously WordPress has its own native Cron for us we don't tend to use that we would normally replace that with the server side Cron so that we have ultimate control over it and with Multisite we found that we had to trigger a Cron per site so that was a small obstacle but we easily found a solution for it we used the WPCLi and wrote a few bash scripts and things like that so that obstacle was like... I'd say it was small in terms of the overall development that was really a small obstacle and then there's another one as well so the way that Multisite handles users is that they're all still grouped together in one main user table so different clients that have their own clients that are not related to those sites exactly so you have some clients where they want all of the users even like the TV network one for example they have seven different brands and seven separate instances of Multisite but they want all of their users to be able to compete together amongst each other so people from the German TV channel compete with the Austrian and the Czech and Belgian and so on with some clients they obviously don't want their users to be in that pool with another client's users so we needed a way of not only separating the users per site but also grouping them together in some cases as well but we did find some custom systems to identify which user belongs which site how do you do these custom fields for a number of users? on registration so depending on which site they register through we then create an user meta which knows which site they joined through which site they belong to but then we also have some way of saying these six sites are part of a group so we can actually group them together as well exactly that type of thing that sounds cool they seem like sort of problems at the time especially because this was only really our second major project using Multisite so some of these things we weren't used to coming from just a straight WordPress developer background but they were easy to find the answers to and actually we found working with Multisite just as easy as we did working with normal WordPress yeah that's good because me too and many developers find working with WordPress Multisite is easy to work with that's why it's so easy to make projects with that how do you feel for other companies that are not your clients right now is there a second choice to pick a software project like this for their businesses? I think so, I think if it's the right use case I would like to give too much advice to our competitors but I think for anyone even outside of sports as well some of the use cases that I've seen in your presentation at WordCamp and elsewhere you know you can see where it's very very appropriate so I think for something like this where it's a white label product that needs to be branded for various different clients and things like that that's a great use case for it also for things like networks of websites where you've got one publisher but they have let's say a hundred different websites within that publisher they all work from the same theme, they all work from the same plugins if you can make that all work from a single code base then you've only got one code base to maintain and that for me is the beauty of Multisite is that instead of maintaining ten different code bases for ten different websites you can maintain one and those websites all have very similar functionality and look and feel and things it makes a lot of sense So I just wanted to make it clear Did SNAP Media start it as a small startup made a software as a service with all the press, Multisite and grown up right now to 40 people? What are you here? No, no, we started really as a blogging platform so it started with one flagship website footballfarencast.com which originally was a news and podcasting platform for football and at the time when I joined the website was being outsourced and it was built on a Drupal platform when I joined they wanted a major overhaul of the website and they needed someone who was more full-time to come and work with them and things so at that point I convinced them to move everything over to WordPress so we were really working with single instances of WordPress at that point I built a few more sites and we started to sort of build out from being a single site into a network right now we have about I think 40 sites that we own and operate and then supply advertising and technology services to around another 350 websites who are mostly WordPress, I'd say around 80% of them use WordPress and then the others are a mixture of forums and other different types of software I see, that's an interesting example of building business with WordPress, Multisite definitely, yeah I mean it's our second time using it we've had a previous client which had one of these networks of websites they had around 100 websites for various different teams and they wanted to upgrade the technology and they were keen to move to the WordPress platform as well so we also suggested Multisite to these guys and helped them to build out their network and migrate everything into Multisite setup and what's been really good about that is getting a single code base to maintain so you make an improvement and you only have to deploy it once to one instance the rest is all the other sites benefit from that and also it gave them the ability to easily spin up a new site so how long does it take to spin up a new website for the new client in second meeting? well it depends a lot on the website, we do a lot of custom work as well some of our stuff is outside of WordPress it really depends but I think within these Multisite environments like the example I was just giving, it's very very quick you could do five a day, you know if you have everything ready, all the branding and assets and everything ready you could do it very very quickly for standard WordPress installs it's probably just a bit longer but you have to set up things like a virtual host and more configuration on the server side per site and then for custom jobs like we work with professional football association things like that, those type of jobs can take between weeks and months depending on the build and what if I do a new one? with Multisite, yeah so the example I was giving for that network as long as they had assets they could spin up a site within an hour or two really just setting the options, testing everything works how do clients do feel about using WordPress Multisite now? well our clients are incredibly happy in both the examples I gave for the network and also the main project that I was talking about, the predictor game so for the predictor game the client was very very happy with the way it all operated and ran we met all of their requirements I think during the World Cup we supported around 10,000 players of the game across the seven different TV channels since then we've launched for two new clients at the beginning of the Premier League season and also we're continuing to develop the products so the White Label product has already had major improvements in the last few weeks which were based on my learnings from the World Cup so some of the features that the World Cup client wanted we've now built in as proper options into the White Label offering and expanded on that and we'll continue to do so so it's an actually ongoing, evolving project what is it like to non-technical staff of the clients using this system that they get? well it was fine for them because they have a different sort of brand manager per site so we can give that person back end access to each site individually so their Dutch channel manager gets the back end for the Dutch site only so you are the super enemy? exactly, we can set them up as admins on each site so actually only we need to be super admins because we maintain the product and set up the site for each client but the client himself doesn't need to see the other sites or anything like that so we can obviously control their access and they found it easy as well they were able to do things like go in and update text add extra pages to the site and to the menus and things like that because we're using all the core features of WordPress we're using the standard posts and pages set up we're using the standard menu manager all of that so it's as easy as in regular WordPress install? exactly, I mean to them it just looks like a normal WordPress install and obviously with things like roles and responsibilities we can decide which things they get access to so we'd probably restrict access to things like themes and plugins but we would give them access to users, pages and so on that sounds amazing and this is such an interesting case of using WordPress as a website so thank you very much for your interesting story for this interview, for sharing your experience with us thank you thank you as well, thanks for interviewing me it was nice to meet you and your work got brightened and to see you again here yeah likewise, alright thanks very much