The Challenge
The American Institute for Economic Research, a 90-year-old independent research institute, operates three websites: an institutional hub, a daily news publication, and an editorial magazine. When FatLab took over in 2025, all three sites had recently been separated from a shared platform by a previous developer, leaving behind performance issues, security gaps, and no system for connecting AIER's 74+ research scholars to their published work across all three properties. The sites collectively housed nearly 20,000 published articles, research papers, books, podcasts, and events, but they weren't working together.
Our Solution
FatLab took over all three sites and executed a two-phase approach: first stabilizing the inherited problems, then building new capabilities. The stabilization work cleaned up database performance, strengthened security, and resolved issues left over from the platform separation. The marquee new feature was a system that connects AIER's 74+ research scholars across all three publications. A scholar's profile is maintained in one place and automatically appears on other sites, including their complete body of work. Editors update a bio once, and it shows up everywhere. FatLab now provides ongoing managed hosting, security, and development support across all three properties.
What We Built
- Adopted and stabilized 3 inherited websites with nearly 20,000 published content items
- A unified scholar system linking 74+ researcher profiles across two publications automatically
- Scholar bios maintained in one place, appearing everywhere with no duplication and no manual syncing
- Performance improvements addressing inherited technical debt from the previous platform migration
- 3 distinct website designs each serving different audiences: research, news, and editorial
- Ongoing managed hosting, security, and development support across the full ecosystem
Project Overview
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is an independent economic research institute founded in 1933 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. For more than 90 years, AIER has conducted research and published analysis on economic and financial topics, producing scholarship that reaches policymakers, academics, and the public. The organization operates three distinct digital properties: aier.org, the institutional hub; thedailyeconomy.org, a daily news publication; and fusionaier.org, an editorial magazine.
When FatLab took over management of these three sites in 2025, this was not a greenfield project. All three WordPress installations had been recently split from a single WordPress multisite network by a previous developer. The multisite-to-standalone migration left behind significant technical debt: bloated databases carrying remnants of the shared-database era, plugin configurations built for a different architecture, and no unified system for connecting AIER's 74+ research scholars to their published work across all three properties. The sites collectively contained nearly 20,000 published content items spanning research papers, news articles, books, podcasts, events, and editorial features.
FatLab's engagement was fundamentally about adoption and integration: taking responsibility for three complex, content-rich WordPress installations built by someone else, stabilizing their foundations, remediating inherited problems, and then building new custom functionality on top. This is a different kind of project than a clean build. It requires understanding someone else's architectural decisions, identifying what works, fixing what doesn't, and extending the platform without disrupting nearly 20,000 pieces of published content.
How the Ecosystem Works
AIER's digital presence is built around three WordPress sites that serve distinct audiences and editorial purposes while sharing a common pool of research scholars. Each site runs its own custom block theme with its own design system, plugin stack, and content architecture.
The Three Sites
| Site | Purpose | Theme | Content Scale | Plugins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| aier.org | Institutional hub - research, events, bookstore, podcasts, scholars | Custom FSE block theme (Financier Display/Text, Figure) | Nearly 8,000 items across 10 post types | 43 |
| thedailyeconomy.org | Daily news publication - economic commentary and analysis | Custom block theme with article-author taxonomy | Nearly 10,000 published posts | 17 |
| fusionaier.org | Editorial magazine - long-form features and commentary | Custom block theme with dynamic color system | 250+ published posts | 15 |
Combined, the three sites manage nearly 20,000 published content items with 75 active plugins across FatLab's managed hosting infrastructure.
Cross-Site Scholar Integration
The defining technical feature of this ecosystem is a custom cross-site scholar integration system that connects AIER's 74+ research scholars with their published work across both aier.org and The Daily Economy. Scholar profiles are maintained in a single location on aier.org and automatically appear on thedailyeconomy.org - complete with bios, headshots, and aggregated article listings from both publications.
For visitors, this means a scholar's profile page on The Daily Economy displays their full biography from aier.org, along with articles they've written for both publications, all assembled in real time via a REST API. For editors, this means updating a scholar's bio once on aier.org propagates the change everywhere, with no manual duplication, no sync processes, and no risk of conflicting information across sites.
Technical Implementation
AIER.org - Institutional Hub
The flagship site runs a custom Full Site Editing block theme with 38 templates and a custom typography system that features the Financier Display, Financier Text, and Figure typefaces. The theme's functions.php spans 2,457 lines, reflecting the breadth of custom functionality required by a 90-year-old research institution.
The site is powered by 35 custom shortcodes that handle everything from scholar displays and research listings to content formatting. A people directory (1,663 lines) provides a browsable, filterable listing of AIER's research scholars and staff.
Content is managed across 10 active custom post types:
| Post Type | Count | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Research | 4,200+ | Working papers, briefs, and research publications |
| Article | 1,700+ | Commentary, analysis, and news |
| People (Legacy) | 800+ | Historical personnel records from multisite era |
| Research Publication | 700+ | Formal publications and reports |
| Book | 108 | Published books and monographs |
| Podcast | 51 | Audio content and episode archives |
| Events, Media Appearances, and others | Various | Supporting content types |
The site also integrates The Events Calendar for managing AIER's speaking engagements and conferences, WooCommerce for the institutional bookstore, and Constant Contact for email list management.
The Daily Economy - Daily News Publication
The Daily Economy runs a custom block theme with a 947-line functions.php focused on performance and editorial flexibility. The theme introduces 4 custom REST API endpoints that power dynamic content features across the site, including filtered article feeds and scholar data retrieval.
A key architectural decision in the TDE theme is the custom article-author taxonomy that decouples article attribution from WordPress user accounts. This allows the editorial team to attribute articles to scholars and external contributors without creating WordPress user accounts for every author, an important distinction for a publication that features contributions from dozens of research fellows who should never need WordPress login credentials.
The theme implements query result caching for expensive database queries, reducing server load on a site that publishes daily and maintains an archive of nearly 10,000 posts. A newsletter mid-article positioning system automatically inserts email signup calls-to-action at calculated positions within article content, optimizing for reader engagement without requiring manual placement by editors.
Fusion - Editorial Magazine
Fusion runs the leanest of the three themes with a 141-line functions.php that prioritizes visual design over complex functionality. The theme's signature feature is a dynamic post color system that cycles through 4 color pairs, assigning each article a distinct color combination for visual variety across listing pages and feeds.
A grayscale image filtering system applies consistent photographic treatment to featured images, giving the magazine a cohesive editorial aesthetic. The theme includes 12 block patterns that provide editors with pre-designed layout options for magazine-style content: feature articles, pull quotes, image galleries, and editorial layouts that maintain the publication's visual identity without requiring custom CSS per article.
The Scholar Integration Plugins
The cross-site scholar system is built on two purpose-built plugins that work together in a hub-and-spoke architecture:
AIER Unified Scholars (Hub Plugin - aier.org): This plugin exposes scholar data through a custom REST API endpoint at /wp-json/aier/v1/scholars/{slug}. It aggregates a scholar's published articles from aier.org and The Daily Economy into a single feed, manages a dedicated media_appearance custom post type for tracking press and media coverage, provides 6 shortcodes for embedding scholar information throughout the institutional site, and generates JSON-LD Person schema markup for search-engine structured data. The plugin includes configurable caching with intelligent invalidation hooks that refresh cached data when scholar profiles or articles are updated.
TDE AIER Scholar Integration (Consumer Plugin - thedailyeconomy.org): This plugin consumes the scholar API from aier.org and renders scholar profiles, bios, and article listings on The Daily Economy. It implements a 3-layer caching architecture: Object Cache Pro serves as the first layer for sub-millisecond reads, WordPress transients provide the second layer, and a 24-hour stale fallback ensures scholar data remains available even if the API is temporarily unreachable. This graceful degradation means a temporary outage on aier.org never results in broken scholar pages on The Daily Economy.
The consumer plugin includes 5 custom Gutenberg blocks for embedding scholar content in the block editor - bio cards, article listings, scholar grids, and profile summaries that editors can place anywhere in the publication. It also provides 4 shortcodes for backwards compatibility and a template override system that lets the theme customize how scholar data is rendered without modifying the plugin itself.
Cross-site communication between the two plugins requires CORS configuration to allow API requests between aier.org and thedailyeconomy.org. Cache invalidation is handled through hooks: when a scholar's profile is updated on aier.org, the hub plugin's caching layer is refreshed, and the consumer plugin's stale data naturally expires through its tiered cache TTLs.
Plugin Stacks
aier.org (43 plugins):
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Custom | AIER Unified Scholars | Cross-site scholar API hub with content aggregation |
| SEO | SmartCrawl | Search engine optimization and XML sitemaps |
| E-commerce | WooCommerce + Stripe | Institutional bookstore with payment processing |
| Events | The Events Calendar | Conference and event management |
| Constant Contact Forms | Newsletter signup and list management | |
| Analytics | Matomo | Self-hosted analytics (privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics) |
| Performance | Object Cache Pro, Breeze | Redis object caching + page caching with Varnish |
| Security | Defender Pro | Firewall, malware scanning, login protection |
thedailyeconomy.org (17 plugins):
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Custom | TDE AIER Scholar Integration | Scholar API consumer with 5 Gutenberg blocks |
| SEO | SmartCrawl | Search engine optimization |
| Analytics | Matomo | Self-hosted analytics |
| Performance | Object Cache Pro, Breeze | Redis object caching + page caching |
| Security | Defender Pro | Security hardening |
fusionaier.org (15 plugins):
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | SmartCrawl | Search engine optimization |
| Analytics | Matomo | Self-hosted analytics |
| Performance | Breeze | Page caching |
| Security | Defender Pro | Security hardening |
Performance Remediation
When FatLab inherited the three sites, each carried performance overhead from the WordPress multisite-to-standalone migration. The previous developer had split one multisite network into three independent installations, but the separation was incomplete. Databases retained tables and configuration data from the shared-database era, plugin stacks included tools no longer relevant to standalone operations, and redirect rules accumulated during the transition remained active without documentation.
The most significant remediation work centered on aier.org, where the database contained over 150 tables, far more than a standard WordPress installation. Among these were 48 Matomo analytics tables consuming significant storage and query overhead. FatLab audited the full table inventory, identified orphaned multisite-era tables, and optimized the database to reduce bloat while preserving all active data.
Object Cache Pro with Redis was deployed on both aier.org and The Daily Economy to provide persistent object caching. For a site like aier.org with 10 custom post types and nearly 8,000 content items, object caching dramatically reduces database query load by storing frequently accessed data in Redis memory. The Daily Economy, with its nearly 10,000-post archive and daily publishing schedule, benefits similarly from cached query results that prevent repetitive database hits on archive and category pages.
FatLab also conducted a plugin audit across all three sites, evaluating each plugin for necessity, performance impact, and security posture. The goal was not to minimize plugin count for its own sake, but to ensure every active plugin served a clear purpose and was actively maintained. Redirect rules from the multisite split were consolidated and rationalized, replacing ad-hoc redirect chains with clean, documented rules.
Security and Infrastructure
All three sites are hosted on FatLab's managed cloud infrastructure in an East Coast data center, providing geographic proximity to AIER's operations and audience. The hosting stack is tuned for content-heavy WordPress sites and includes performance optimization at the server level:
- Object Cache Pro with Redis for persistent object caching on aier.org and The Daily Economy
- Breeze with Varnish integration for page caching across all three sites
- Cloudflare CDN and DDoS protection
- Defender Pro on all three sites for firewall rules, malware scanning, and login protection
- Matomo self-hosted analytics on all three sites, providing full visitor data without sending information to third-party analytics services
- Automated daily backups with off-site storage
The decision to run Matomo as self-hosted analytics across all three sites reflects AIER's preference for data sovereignty. Visitor analytics are processed on AIER's own infrastructure rather than by external services.
Results and Impact
This engagement represents a category of work that is common in practice but rarely discussed: adopting and improving someone else's WordPress builds. FatLab did not design these three sites, did not choose their themes or plugin stacks, and did not make the original architectural decisions. The work began with understanding what was inherited, stabilizing what was fragile, and then building new capabilities on a foundation that FatLab could stand behind.
The scale alone is notable: nearly 20,000 published content items across three interconnected WordPress installations, spanning research papers, daily news articles, books, podcasts, events, and editorial features. Managing this volume of content across three sites with distinct editorial teams, publishing cadences, and audiences requires infrastructure that is both robust and flexible.
The custom cross-site scholar integration system is the centerpiece of FatLab's new development work. By building a hub-and-spoke API architecture with multi-layer caching and graceful degradation, FatLab gave AIER something the three standalone sites never had: a unified view of their 74+ research scholars and their published work across properties. A scholar's profile is maintained once on aier.org and automatically appears on The Daily Economy, with their articles from both publications.
The three-layer caching system ensures this integration is fast under normal conditions and resilient when things go wrong. Visitor-facing pages never break because of a temporary API hiccup. For AIER, this means their 90-year legacy of economic research is presented as a cohesive body of work, not three disconnected websites that happen to share some of the same authors.
Results
- Nearly 20,000 published content items managed across 3 interconnected WordPress sites
- 74+ research scholar profiles unified across two publications via custom REST API
- Multi-layer caching architecture with Object Cache Pro, transients, and 24-hour stale fallback
- Performance remediation reducing database overhead from multisite-era technical debt
- 3 custom block themes with distinct design systems serving research, news, and editorial audiences
- Single source of truth for scholar data eliminating cross-site content duplication