Custom WordPress theme development for one of North America’s longest-running culinary television franchises — two successive production themes built to carry a large editorial archive, a recipe library, and a DVD store.
Great Chefs Television/Publishing (GCI Inc., New Orleans) brought decades of culinary programming to WordPress in 2009 — celebrity chef profiles, a deep recipe archive, streaming video, and a DVD catalogue all under one brand. They needed a custom theme built to the editorial weight of the content: a mature food media operation, not a repurposed blog template.
What I built
I designed and built two successive custom WordPress themes for greatchefs.com on WordPress 2.8.x — the initial live production theme (greatchefstheme, November 2009) and a refined second iteration (gchef_tester, April 2010). Both carry my author attribution in their WordPress stylesheet headers, confirmed by Wayback Machine captures at both dates.
- Video integration: YouTube embeds across a featured video zone and a three-column video grid, serving the brand’s streaming archive without hosting overhead.
- Recipe and chef archive: Clean permalink structure across /recipes/, /chefs/, and category archives — built to be browsable and indexable, not just navigable.
- DVD store: PayPal-native checkout built into the theme. WooCommerce didn’t exist yet; this was a hand-built cart and product layout inside a custom template.
- Audio player: NiftyPlayer Flash MP3 integration embedded directly in the theme, serving streaming audio for select content without a plugin dependency.
- Celebrity news feed: Aggregated press coverage organized by chef name — Bobby Flay and others keyed to their dedicated profile pages.
- Navigation architecture: Nine primary sections — News, Store, Videos, Recipes, Chefs, Villa Rental, Blog, About, Syndication — served from a single cohesive custom template.
Stack and context
WordPress 2.8.x, jQuery 1.3.2, Prototype/Scriptaculous, Lightbox 2, Contact Form 7, FeedBurner RSS, WordPress.com Stats. Fixed-width two-column layout built for the desktop web of 2009 — the year before responsive design became a standard expectation. Typography anchored in Adobe Garamond Pro with brand-matched deep red headlines, consistent with Great Chefs’ printed cookbooks and television production identity.
The site ran my theme through at least July 2011 (confirmed across a WordPress 3.0.5 upgrade with the theme intact). It remains live today under different ownership and a replacement theme — with the same core content architecture, Chefs, Recipes, Videos, and Store, still recognizable from the 2010 build.
Archive evidence: both theme stylesheets preserved in the Wayback Machine with Author: Christopher Ross and Author URI: http://thisismyurl.com/. Captures dated December 2009 and April 2010.
Read next
- Postmedia WordPress VIP Migration. A different publishing brand at a much larger scale — same architectural questions about archives and editorial flow.
- What Publishing Teams Need in a WordPress Build. The pattern this build followed, written up in detail.
- How a Publishing-Grade WordPress Migration Actually Runs. The pillar piece on what a delivery of this shape looks like end-to-end.
