The Successful Investor

I’ve seen a lot of WordPress sites that had a lot of content, but The Successful Investor is definitely up there. They already have nearly 10,000 posts that are published or pending (not to mention pages, media, etc), and they are adding new posts constantly. Those posts are organized into over 80 categories using over 1,500 tags! With that many posts and tags, we quickly ran into problems with related posts plugins causing pages to take forever to load. Xavisys developed a very customized related posts plugin using an entirely new approach to solve the problem. The basic concept of the plugin was so exciting that we couldn’t bear to have only one site using it. The one written for The successful Investor was too customized to distribute, but the concept was turned into the “Efficient Related Posts WordPress plugin” which we have released to the public. Additionally, we’re happy to announce that this site also uses our publicly available PayPal Framework to handle all it’s PayPal integration as well as to listen for IPN messages from PayPal which are then handled by other plugins!

To see how well WordPress can scale and how great the PayPal framework works, go check out The Successful Investor

Xavisys worked with the Mequoda Group on this project. Mequoda is completely responsible for the design and planning, and Xavisys is responsible for much of the back end programming. Xavisys was totally responsible for adding functionality for them to organize their posts based on ticker symbol, adding additional features to the edit post page to make it easy to select a ticker and year/month for each post, and to keep their selected categories from floating to the top (they have a lot of categories that have the same name but different parent categories).

The site also runs many of the Mequoda Pro plugins, some of which Xavisys has written (to Mequoda standards and best practices). The ones that Xavisys wrote include automated tag management, a settings plugin that keeps live and development settings out of the files for easy deployment from development server to live servers, a transaction logger that is used to create reports based on different actions taken by users, as well as a plugin that tracks source codes which are used to generate reports to show profitability based on different referring sources.

The original scope of the project has been completed, but additional development is still ongoing. This project has been a great way to see how well WordPress can scale if you do things right!