Matchbook Festival
CLIENT
ARTHOUSE Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, Mythus, IX, Ena, Timber/Twig, PHP 8.4, MariaDB, Redis, nginx, DDEV, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare
YEAR
2026
EXTERNAL URL
The official marketing site for Matchbook Festival, built on my standard Mythus + IX + Ena child-theme WordPress stack and deployed to a dedicated DigitalOcean droplet via git-push. A single-droplet staging-and-dark-production model kept the live site private and noindexed until the client signed off, then flipped it public through a documented runbook.
Full build, infrastructure, and launch for ARTHOUSE Interactive. Launched to production July 2026.
Background
A festival needed a marketing site live on a firm date — without tipping its hand early.
ARTHOUSE Interactive engaged me to build and launch the marketing site for Matchbook Festival on the standard freelance WordPress stack. Like most event marketing, the launch had to hit a fixed date and stay coordinated with the client’s announcement — the site needed to be fully built, reviewed, and staged well ahead of time, but not discoverable to the public or search engines until the moment it went live.
The interesting constraint was operational: run a real staging-and-production workflow on a single, cost-efficient droplet without the public stumbling onto the show early.
Implementation
A repeatable WordPress build with a git-push pipeline and a dark-production launch model.
The site runs on the Mythus mu-plugin framework and IX parent theme with a child theme scaffolded from my Ena starter — Timber/Twig, PHP 8.4, MariaDB, and a Redis object cache behind nginx. Deployment is git-push: a bare-repo post-receive hook per branch runs Composer install, the asset build, and a cache flush, so pushing to the staging branch updates staging and pushing to production updates the live site.
Staging and production both lived on a single DigitalOcean droplet, isolated from each other, with production kept dark — access-gated and noindexed — until ARTHOUSE cleared the staging build. The public launch was a deliberate, documented flip rather than a scramble: promote to production, open access, drop the noindex, and verify.
Cloudflare fronted the site for DNS and TLS, with the standard droplet caching layer tuned so cache behavior didn’t fight the launch-day cutover.
Results
Launched on schedule, on a lean footprint the client can afford to keep.
Matchbook Festival went live on its target date in July 2026 via a clean promotion from staging, with no early exposure and no launch-day surprises. The single-droplet staging/production setup kept hosting lean while still giving the client a real environment to review against before anything went public.
The Mythus + IX + Ena stack and git-push pipeline are the same repeatable pattern I bring to every ARTHOUSE build, which is what makes these launches predictable.
