foodspring

foodspring sold sports nutrition direct from Berlin — protein, supplements, bars — across a dozen countries, and had been majority-owned by Mars since 2019. Its Magazine was the editorial half of that: training and nutrition articles, published in every language the shop sold in. At that size, a magazine is as much a translation problem as a publishing one.

We joined the content platform team in March 2022, for the part nobody markets. Behaviour lived partly in a theme's functions.php and partly in a plugin that had grown without a plan, which is how most sites end up after years of shipping. The brief was to give it a plan.

That meant putting the plugin under a namespace and Composer, declaring its content types instead of improvising them, enforcing WordPress Coding Standards with PHPCS, running static analysis through PHPStan with its WordPress extension, splitting webpack into real development and production builds, and adding unit tests where there had been none. Underneath it sat a Docker environment on wp-env with Redis and MailHog, so an editor's bug report could be reproduced on a laptop instead of argued about.

The other half was language. Translation ran through Smartling, and the plan was Polylang on a new WordPress. So the work that mattered was making those two agree: a prototype of the pairing, the custom fields it needed, and keeping the sync alive when credentials changed underneath it.

Five months of it, inside their sprint rather than thrown over the wall: daily standup, refinement, review, and the Magazine's build and deployment pipeline alongside the code. foodspring closed its customer-facing business on 30 June 2025 and the Magazine went with it, which is why there is nothing here to link to.