Tileyard

London / North / Education

Overview

Tileyard is a major creative and music-industry hub, combining studio space, education, label & publishing operations, and community for artists and music businesses. It includes Tileyard London, Tileyard Education, and Tileyard North.

Tileyard Education provides postgraduate and professional training in songwriting, production, and music business, in close partnership with the music industry and leveraging the rich ecosystem at Tileyard.

Challenges

  • The project was originally started by another agency but left incomplete. I was hired to take over, rebuild significant parts of the codebase over time, and now maintain all three websites (Tileyard London, Tileyard Education, Tileyard North).
  • Key challenges included stabilising legacy code, ensuring unified deployment and maintenance workflows across sites, and creating frontend tools that simplify content updates and expansions.

CMS

The sites run on WordPress, rebuilt on top of Bedrock to bring modern PHP practices into the workflow. Composer is used to manage and require plugins, with strict PHP linting and WordPress coding standards applied for maintainability and consistency. Using Bedrock also means the entire application is version-controlled in GitHub. With a single set of commands, a developer can spin up the project, install the required plugins, and get a fully working environment.

Frontend

The frontend is built with PHP, HTML, SCSS, and TypeScript, using a modular component-based system. This allows reusable elements to be developed once and applied across the sites, keeping the design consistent and development efficient.

Deployment

I developed a set of custom Bash and Node.js scripts to handle common tasks:

  • Database push/pull with automated search-and-replace via WP-CLI
  • Uploads folder synchronisation between environments
  • Site cloning, allowing a live site to be pulled down to local (or vice versa) in a single command
  • Code deployment via SSH, using rsync to build and transfer the application
  • Database monitoring with WP-CLI to detect suspicious changes such as potential hacks

Page Builder

The content editor experience is powered by a custom ACF-based page builder. Editors can create any type of page or post by combining modular blocks, giving them flexibility without sacrificing consistency or performance.

Focus on Quality

Throughout the build, the emphasis was on clean, maintainable code, accessibility, performance optimisation, and long-term scalability across all three sites.

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Tileyard

London North Education