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Penske Media Corporation (PMC) is a leading digital media, publishing, and information services company that engages with audiences across the web, television, mobile, print and social media. PMC publishes more than 22 brands, including the GoldDerby which is a odds and predictions game site for Films and TV Awards.
PMC reached out to Ndevr to help them migrate the GoldDerby website from a custom cakePHP site to their WordPress platform while adhering to WordPress.com VIP coding standard so the site can potentially be hosted on WordPress.com VIP. Ndevr was responsible for developing the gameplay portion.
As the gameplay would involve various odds calculations and prediction data, the complexity of the data architecture would go beyond WordPress data system. Custom database tables would have to be created to accommodate the intricacy.
The gameplay site require numerous dynamic content rendering and updating. This would require handle most of the transaction on the front end layer.
The initial requirement was to move the gameplay logic and calculation algorithm as is. However, the legacy logic was developed over many years and would potentially cause performance issues.
While Ndevr was working on the gameplay portion of the site, PMC’s internal development team concurrently worked on migrating other content sections. Both teams needed to be proactive in communications to make sure the code merge process would not cause too much overhead.
One of the primary issues of the former gameplay system was the accuracy and timing of the odds and results. By using a custom-built task manager Ndevr was able to process odds and results at nearly real-time, giving the players an up-to-date view of their games and a better user experience.
Aside from the gameplay user experience benefits, the gameplay editors have an updated administration interface to manage more robust games and contests with greater ease.
From a code management perspective, Ndevr was able to deliver a gameplay codebase which is far more manageable to maintain and add features. This was accomplished by adhering to code quality standards and implementing a process of automated code linting and peer review.