About Closer To Truth:
- Closer To Truth is a long-running public-television and online series about the cosmos, consciousness, meaning and God.
- It features interviews with leading scientists and philosophers, published across four websites.
The Role:
- Closer To Truth is looking for a WordPress developer to maintain and enhance closertotruth.com and its video library tools, after a two-week handover from the current maintainer.
- The site is moving from WordPress to Astro and Sanity in a new version called CTT 3.0, led by a separate senior developer.
- This role keeps the current site running well until that launch and supports the content migration.
- The WordPress work is expected to shrink or end once CTT 3.0 launches.
What You Will Own:
- closertotruth.com (CTT 2.0): the main site, a large library of interview videos, contributor profiles, topic pages, playlists and member accounts.
- WordPress, PHP, custom Roots Sage theme with Laravel Blade, ACF Pro, MySQL/MariaDB, jQuery, Sass, webpack, Redis, Pantheon (dev, test and live, Terminus CLI), GitHub Actions.
- Video library tools: internal tools that upload videos to YouTube and link them into WordPress.
- Python, Flask, YouTube Data API.
Responsibilities:
- Maintain and enhance closertotruth.com: theme and plugin work, Redis caching, WordPress core and plugin updates, and releases through the Pantheon dev, test and live environments.
- Maintain the video library tools until they move to the new site at CTT 3.0 launch.
- Support the CTT 3.0 content migration: export WordPress data, explain ACF fields and content relationships, and coordinate any content freeze with the lead developer.
- Report progress through written, asynchronous handoffs.
Mandatory Requirements:
- At least 3 years of professional WordPress development experience.
- PHP, custom WordPress themes, ACF, plugins and hooks.
- MySQL or MariaDB.
- Git and GitHub.
- Fluent written English.
- Most of the work runs through written, asynchronous handoffs.
- At least 3 to 4 hours of overlap with US Central Time, ideally mornings.
Good To Have:
- Roots Sage with Laravel Blade.
- Pantheon hosting (dev, test and live environments, Terminus CLI).
- Redis caching.
- jQuery, Sass and webpack.
- GitHub Actions.
- WordPress data export (WP REST API, WP-CLI).
- Python and Flask.
- YouTube Data API.
- Linux and Bash.
Engagement and Working Conditions:
- Engagement: a monthly retainer or block of hours for maintenance.
- Hours: maintenance across all Closer To Truth systems has needed up to 30 hours a month so far, and this role covers part of that.
- Duration: until CTT 3.0 launches, when the WordPress work is expected to shrink or end.
- The launch date follows the final 3.0 scope of work.
- Location: remote, with at least 3 to 4 hours of overlap with US Central Time, ideally mornings.
- Start: a two-week handover from the current maintainer.
- Contract: an NDA before access to the codebase or internal materials, and a contractor agreement with work-for-hire and IP assignment to Closer To Truth.
