Fstoppers is one of the largest photography communities on the web, with millions of monthly visitors and hundreds of thousands of registered users. I've been the sole developer and designer for over 12 years. That includes the administrative backend and content workflows running on Drupal, a robust suite of custom modules that power the platform's features, the frontend design and user experience, and the AWS infrastructure underneath it all.
How I Got Involved
I was brought on to solve two problems at the same time. The site was a WordPress blog with an unoptimized theme that crashed every time an article went viral. The infrastructure couldn't handle the traffic spikes. At the same time, the owners wanted to expand beyond publishing and turn the site into a real community: member uploads, profiles, following, voting on each other's images, top-rated work, editor's picks, photo of the day, the whole thing.
I migrated the site from WordPress to Drupal, moved it onto AWS for horizontal scalability, and built the community platform from the ground up.
Editorial
A team of staff writers publishes original articles daily on photography, technology, and the creative world. I built a fully custom editorial publishing system that lets administrative editors schedule posts and run an approval workflow for the staff of writers, handling drafts, reviews, scheduling, and publishing all in one place. Content is tagged by topic so it flows automatically into the newsletter, the member following system, and the topic feeds throughout the site.
A personalized weekly newsletter pulls articles from each member's followed topics, sending every subscriber a unique digest tuned to their interests.
Community
Members share their own photos, vote on each other's work, follow both topics and other users, and compete in monthly brand-sponsored contests. The community runs on custom-built features including private messaging, on-site activity notifications, editor's picks curated from member uploads, and a gamified badge system that rewards milestones across years of participation.
E-commerce
The Fstoppers store sells original photography tutorials as digital products. When I took the project over, the store was hosted on a separate third-party platform with no real connection to user accounts on the main site. Customers bought tutorials in one place and accessed them in another, and the disconnect made everything from support to upgrades unnecessarily painful.
I rebuilt the entire store inside the platform itself on Drupal Commerce, with a suite of custom store modules and a license system that handles product delivery, access control, and digital downloads. I also migrated every existing customer's purchase history out of the third-party platform without breaking access to anything they'd already bought.
Sitting on top of the store is a custom affiliate program with referral tracking and partner dashboards, and an automated invoicing system that handles three payout types: writers paid per pageview, instructors paid per sale, and affiliates paid per referral. All of it runs monthly without manual data entry.