Playbooks was built from a Figma design, but that’s where its simplicity ends.
This site was conceived from the start as a robust platform for publishing and displaying a specific type of post—a “Playbook”—linked to “Phantoms,” the core marketing product of the company that owns it. The site is a subdomain of their main website, dedicated exclusively to these Playbooks.
The challenge was to build a system that satisfied both the creators writing the Playbooks and the visitors reading and using them. The site expects relatively high traffic, and users on both sides—neither being highly tech-savvy—required an interface that was simple, intuitive, stable, and fast. In short, this project put to the test the claim that WordPress/Elementor can now rapidly create high‑quality sites that, until recently, would have required complex, expensive technologies and entire teams of specialists.
And it succeeded. In many cases where out‑of‑the‑box solutions were needed—solutions beyond Elementor and its standard add‑ons—I wrote custom code. Yet the foundation remains Elementor, leveraging all its core strengths.
For the search and filtering engine, I used FacetWP combined with Relevanssi. This alone demanded additional coding, as FacetWP is a powerful plugin that prioritizes speed and reliability over widget‑style flexibility. The sophisticated back‑end system of custom post types, fields, and taxonomies was built on the excellent Advanced Custom Fields Pro. All of this rests, of course, on Elementor Pro. Every component was finely tuned and, where necessary, extended with custom PHP and JavaScript. The site was built over roughly ten days, alongside other parallel projects.
The final result is excellent. Content entry in the back‑end isn’t entirely “idiot‑proof,” but it significantly surpasses standard WordPress in usability, making life easier for content writers. On the front‑end, visitors are greeted with a fast, intuitive, and clean interface for navigating the site and accessing its offerings. This success isn’t mine alone—my work built upon an excellent design foundation and thoughtful initial planning by the parent company’s team.
Key technical stack: Elementor Pro, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, FacetWP, Relevanssi, custom PHP/JS.
