Texas Choir Camp

Texas Choir Camp needed a modern and cohesive website that could better represent its programs, events, and educational experience while creating a seamless journey for students, parents, and directors. The existing site was built on an outdated Illdy theme and had been managed by multiple website authors over time, resulting in inconsistent layouts, styling, and messaging with no established style guide to maintain visual consistency. Content lacked structure and flow, making it difficult for visitors to navigate important information or understand the camp experience clearly. Another major challenge was redesigning the platform to feel engaging, organized, and mobile responsive while improving usability, strengthening brand identity, and creating strategic calls to action that would encourage registrations and inquiries.

The Texas Choir Camp website runs on a custom child theme built on top of the Illdy parent theme. To overcome Illdy's aggressive inline style injections and broken stylesheet handle, we implemented a corrected enqueue system that ensures the parent stylesheet loads first, followed by the child stylesheet, and finally a dedicated override sheet called stylez.css — guaranteeing maximum CSS specificity without modifying core theme files. The site's typography was migrated to a custom-hosted version of Glacial Indifference, a clean geometric sans-serif that reflects the camp's brand identity, applied globally with careful exclusions to preserve Font Awesome icon rendering. The TCC brand palette — Navy, Blue, Aqua, Cream, and Green — was registered directly in the WordPress block editor, restricting content editors to only approved brand colors. Custom CSS sections handle the full-cover YouTube background video hero, a gradient event strip, circular featured staff cards, and a gradient full-width section, all built to be responsive and consistent across devices.

While Google Calendar works well for personal scheduling, it quickly becomes unmanageable at the scale of Texas Choir Camp, where a single week can generate upwards of 200 individual events across multiple tracks, venues, and age groups. At that volume, the interface offers no meaningful way to categorize, filter, or bulk-manage events, and manually creating and editing hundreds of entries is time-consuming and error-prone. Sharing the calendar with a large staff compounds the problem — permissions become cumbersome, unintentional edits are hard to track, and there is no audit trail for changes. The Events Calendar plugin directly addresses these limitations by providing a structured, category-driven system with role-based access, a public-facing filterable display, and robust ICS export — a purpose-built solution that scales to the demands of a full week of camp programming.

Our custom Events Calendar plugin extension powers the public-facing camp schedule, providing a fully browsable calendar with category filtering and individual event detail pages. Each event is exportable via a standard ICS feed, allowing campers, parents, and staff to subscribe to the camp calendar directly from their preferred calendar application — Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook — ensuring they receive real-time updates to event dates, times, and locations without needing to revisit the website. Beyond simple subscription, the ICS feed can be scraped on demand at any time, giving administrators and third-party integrations the ability to pull a fresh snapshot of the calendar whenever needed. The feed also supports custom time period parameters, meaning you can scope a scrape to a specific date range — for example, pulling only the events for a single camp session week, a registration window, or an entire season — making it straightforward to pipe camp schedule data into external systems, partner websites, printed materials, or automated communication workflows without manual data entry.

Texas Choir Camp 2026 needed a modern registration system to replace a fragmented Google Forms workflow that left camper data scattered across spreadsheets with no central management, no payment tracking, and no way for families to log in and manage their own registrations. The organization runs a complex multi-tier camp structure serving everyone from Kids Kamp (ages 5–7) through adult clinicians and directors, each with different pricing, housing options, and age-level requirements. Minors require guardian associations, scholarship applicants need a separate payment pathway, and families often register multiple campers simultaneously. The existing process required manual data entry by staff for every registration, with no visibility into payment status, medical forms, or immunization records.

Our team designed and built a full-stack SaaS WordPress plugin — TCC Registration 2.0 — integrating directly with WooCommerce for payment processing and MariaDB for relational data storage across six custom tables. The system features a five-step enrollment wizard that guides families through contact information, camper profiles, medical forms with auto-save, camp selection with age-level auto-suggestion, and a final review before redirecting to WooCommerce checkout. Guardian-camper relationships are managed relationally, scholarship applicants are automatically routed to a deferred payment gateway, and WooCommerce order hooks keep payment status synchronized in real time. A custom PHP import script with duplicate detection, address normalization, camp type mapping, and idempotent execution brought 60-plus existing 2026 registrants — sourced from Google Form exports — into the new system without disrupting live operations. The result is a self-service registration portal where families manage their own accounts, staff have a unified dashboard with full visibility into registrations and payment status, and the organization has a scalable foundation it can extend for future camp years.