The client
BARTENDER® Magazine is a trade magazine for bartenders and people who serve alcohol for a living. Founded by Ray Foley, a former bartender who became known in the industry as “The Legend,” it grew from a small quarterly into the largest on-premise liquor magazine in the United States. Alongside the print magazine, bartender.com is its home online, covering industry news, cocktail recipes, featured bars and branded merchandise.
The challenge
The site ran on an outdated WordPress build that had become hard to manage and hard to grow. News, recipes and bar features didn’t have proper structure behind them, so content was difficult to organize, filter and connect. Updating layouts often needed a developer, and the merchandise side of the business wasn’t well integrated with the rest of the site.
The solution
I rebuilt the site on WordPress using Elementor for page design, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for structured content, and a custom plugin I wrote to handle custom post types, taxonomies and custom queries. Existing content was carried over to the new build so the magazine’s archive wasn’t lost.
Content with real structure
Rather than treating everything as a generic blog post, each type of content now has its own place and its own fields:
News: Industry news and magazine features, organized by category and tag
Recipes: Cocktail recipes with structured details, so they can be browsed and filtered by spirit and style
Bars: Featured bars with their own profile pages
Merchandise: Branded products sold through an integrated WooCommerce store
The custom plugin defines these content types and their taxonomies in code, so the structure is stable and doesn’t depend on settings that can be changed by accident.
Smarter content on every page
Custom queries pull related content together across the site. A recipe page can surface other drinks made with the same spirit, and listing pages show exactly the content they’re meant to, without manual curation.
A site the team can run themselves
Elementor gives the BARTENDER® team control over page layouts, while ACF gives them clear, simple fields for entering recipes, bars and articles. Editors can publish and update content without touching code or calling a developer.
An online store that fits the brand
Merchandise is sold through WooCommerce, built into the same design as the rest of the site. Visitors can move from reading an article or recipe to browsing products without feeling like they’ve left bartender.com.
The results
The magazine’s news, recipes and bar features are organized, connected and easy to browse
Recipes and bars are structured content that can be filtered and reused across the site
The editorial team manages pages and content themselves, which reduces ongoing development costs
Merchandise sales run through a store that’s part of the main site, not bolted on
Tech stack: WordPress, Elementor, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), custom WordPress plugin, WooCommerce
