Celebrity Autobiography
CLIENT
ARTHOUSE Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, Mythus, IX, Timber/Twig, PHP 8.4, Composer, DDEV, DigitalOcean, GTM/GA4
YEAR
2026
EXTERNAL URL
A single long-scroll landing page for the Off-Broadway hit Celebrity Autobiography, built on my three-layer Mythus + IX WordPress stack (provider pattern, PHP-DI container, Timber/Twig). The page pairs a server-rendered talent grid with modal bios, a month-tabbed performance calendar driven by custom date-grouping logic, newsletter capture, and JSON-LD TheaterEvent schema for rich search results.
Design and full-stack development for ARTHOUSE Interactive — now an ongoing post-launch maintenance and feature engagement.
Background
A long-running comedy institution needed a marketing site that could keep pace with a live show.
Celebrity Autobiography — the Drama Desk–winning show where stars perform verbatim from the memoirs of the rich and famous — came to ARTHOUSE Interactive for a marketing site that could sell tickets, rotate an ever-changing celebrity lineup, and publish new performance dates without a developer in the loop. The existing presence was on GoDaddy Managed WordPress, a closed hosting environment with no staging, no deploy workflow, and no room to grow.
The brief: a fast, accessible single-page site with a self-serve calendar and cast grid, engineered to be handed back to the marketing team for day-to-day updates.
Implementation
A provider-based WordPress build, engineered accessibility- and analytics-first.
The site runs on my standard freelance architecture: the Mythus mu-plugin framework and IX parent theme with a project-specific child theme, all on Timber/Twig and PHP 8.4. The talent grid is server-rendered and opens each performer’s bio in an accessible modal; the performance calendar groups dates into month tabs through custom date logic, so the marketing team adds a show date and the calendar reorganizes itself. Newsletter signups feed the client’s email platform, and every event carries JSON-LD TheaterEvent structured data.
Accessibility was a first-class constraint, not a pass at the end: roving-tabindex tablists, a two-tier focus system, and forced-colors (high-contrast) handling throughout. The markup was pre-wired for Google Tag Manager so click-tracking and GA4 events landed with zero additional code changes. I migrated the property off GoDaddy Managed WordPress onto a self-managed DigitalOcean droplet with a git-push deploy workflow and a real staging environment.
nginx + PHP-FPM on a DigitalOcean droplet, deployed via a bare-repo post-receive hook that runs Composer install, the asset build, and a cache flush per push.
Results
A self-serve marketing site the client runs on their own — and a relationship that continues.
The site launched on the self-managed droplet as a fast, accessible single page that the marketing team updates independently — adding performance dates and rotating the celebrity lineup without developer involvement. Moving off Managed WordPress replaced a closed, un-deployable environment with a proper git workflow, staging, and full control of the stack.
The launch turned into an ongoing engagement: post-launch maintenance and incremental feature work for ARTHOUSE Interactive.
