Modernizing a heritage brand’s editorial platform

01Context

Levi Strauss & Co. runs a large, high-visibility WordPress editorial platform. By the time I joined the engagement — through Xebia — parts of the template layer had accumulated years of legacy PHP: hard to change safely, slow for editors, and built before answer engines and LLMs became a discoverability channel that matters.

02The problem

Two pressures at once. Editorial velocity was throttled by rigid, developer-dependent templates — every content variation meant a ticket. And discoverability was shifting: traffic increasingly originates from AI answer engines and rich results, not just blue links, which rewards clean structure and machine-readable content.

03What I did

I worked as a senior engineer on the template-modernization effort: refactoring legacy PHP toward maintainable, componentized templates, and moving editorial control into ACF-driven flexible content so the team could compose pages without engineering in the loop.

• Refactored legacy PHP templates into cleaner, reusable components
• Built ACF flexible-content blocks so editors compose layouts without developer tickets
• Added an answer-engine / LLM discoverability layer — structured data and content surfacing for AI search
• Worked within an enterprise review and release process alongside the Xebia team

04Outcome

The modernization gave editors a faster, safer way to ship content and positioned the platform for the answer-engine era — without disrupting a brand the whole world recognizes. Specifics live under NDA, but the shape of the win is simple: less engineering friction per page, and content built to be found by both people and machines.

5What it adds up to