Chimera CMS

In the early days of Holiday Inn Club Vacations (HCV), we faced a significant challenge: managing our numerous websites. Each of our business units (marketing, rental, etc) had multiple domains that they ran, and it was on our team (Brand Services) to maintain each and every one of them.

We lacked the budget and backing to choose an off-the-shelf content management system (CMS), and they showed no interest in free options like Drupal or WordPress. Our web needs were ever-growing, and we had to use a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver to meet them.

So I hatched a plan. If I couldn't get a budget to buy a professional CMS, and I couldn't get approval to use a free system, I would need to start working on building my own CMS from scratch.

The first version of Chimera I built by myself outside of work hours, and I had to start small. My first goal wasn't to create a full-fledged CMS; it was to create something that would make it easier to build new pages on the backend and be able to run multiple domains off of the same code base. I found a framework called CodeIgniter that would give us a Model View Controller (MVC) system, and started to organize and rebuild the sites we had.

There was no "backend" site to log into yet, and all changes still required a programmer to do it — but we were able to take our tasks that used to take a full week of manual work and get that time down to an hour. I had even figured out a way to take the same concept for web page building and have it build out our emails so we could load it into Salesforce Marketing Cloud (then known as ExactTarget).

After the first release, I was able to make a case to management that we needed a full web team and take our online presence more seriously. I was promoted to a Web Development manager and eventually hired two new developers. Our team was small, but we were scrappy and finally had some additional support to make our CMS even better.

The second version of Chimera marked the beginning of its becoming a real CMS. We upgraded our tech stack to use Laravel as our framework, upgraded from Dreamweaver to PHP Storm as our IDE, and started to use GitHub for the first time so we could work better as a team and keep code backed up and safe.

Laravel allowed us to do a lot as developers. We now had a safe way to make and roll back database changes, allowing us to handle more advanced features like user accounts and a full-fledged admin panel. Plus, since it was entirely built in-house, we could tailor the backend to very specific needs our company had — such as a gallery system for our resort pages that would allow us to upload a large set of photos, automatically tag them based on the folder structure, and then generate captions for each photo automatically based on the tags.

Version 3 of Chimera allowed us to use the CMS for more than just marketing sites. We can now manage internal site needs, even with a small team of 3 developers (including myself).

We built a new company-wide intranet (we had explored third-party options, but they were all considered cost-prohibitive due to the large number of employees we had across resorts) and gave limited access to HR so they could post new blog posts as needed.

We also rebuilt a training system for our Sales Team. This led to the creation of an "achievement" feature to incentivize team members to log in and use the tool regularly. When users performed actions (such as reading articles, logging in daily, etc.), they would receive achievement notifications and points that would rank them on a company-wide leaderboard.

In 2019, I helped oversee a project with an outside agency, Willowtree, to overhaul our web strategy and consolidate our sites into a single consumer and corporate site. This would move us off Chimera and onto a REACT tech stack using Contentstack as the new CMS.

Although I left HCV after the 2021 project, I've been informed by a former team member that they continue to use Chimera for legacy sites and the intranet.