The custom plugin that lets a talent agency manage 90 clients without touching code
How a custom WordPress plugin replaced a dated site for a celebrity talent agency, letting their team manage over ninety clients and a changing events calendar themselves.
2 min readMichael Overton
Coolwaters Productions is a talent agency in Burbank. They represent over ninety actors, puppeteers, voice artists and performers from franchises most of us grew up with, and they work with event promoters across the US, Europe and Japan.
Their website was dated, hard to manage and didn't reflect the calibre of people on it. They needed a rebuild their own team could run day to day, with a roster and an events calendar that change constantly. No designer in the loop for every change.
Why not a theme and some plugins
Because the data is the business. Each client has a biography, credits, franchise tags, social links, event locations and booking details. Each event has a date, a venue, which clients are appearing and a link to book. A generic "team" plugin can't model that, and bolting on a third party calendar means two systems that don't know about each other.
So I wrote one plugin that does.
What it is
Two custom post types, Clients and Events, with purpose built admin screens. Adding a client is a form: name, photo, bio, credits, franchise tags, socials. Adding an event is the same, with a picker for which clients are appearing. Everything is managed from the standard WordPress editor, and nothing on the public site is hand coded.
Then a set of widgets for the front end: a roster grid with instant filtering by franchise, a credits grid, an event timeline grouped by month, countdowns, upcoming appearances, related franchises. The team drops those onto pages and styles them without writing a line.
The bit that mattered most
Their team updates the site themselves, several times a week, and it hasn't needed me to touch the structure since launch. That was the brief. The site looking good was expected. The site being theirs was the point.
What this means for your project
If your business runs on a set of things that change (a roster, a menu, a stock list, a timetable), the website should model those things properly, not fake it with pages. That's what a custom plugin is for, and it's less expensive than people assume, because it replaces a pile of plugins that were never quite right.
If that sounds like your situation, tell me what the things are. I'll tell you how I'd build it.
