The archive
Jules Breton (1827–1906) painted rural life in Artois and Brittany, and julesbreton.com is the online catalogue raisonné of his work: paintings and drawings organised by decade from 1844 to 1906, plus undated works, each with a unique identifier, provenance and bibliography. At 1,159 published works it is a serious scholarly resource, curated by an editor who works in the WordPress admin every week.
Frenchy Digital took over the site in March 2026. The custom plugin that drives it had grown organically, WordPress core was managed by the host, and there was no version control, no staging discipline and no activity log. The first month went into fixing what visitors could see: a pagination cap that hid works from category pages, gallery links broken by a typographic ligature filter rewriting "oe" to "œ" inside URLs, and a single-artwork layout that overflowed when descriptions used column blocks.
What a catalogue raisonné needs from its software
- A stable identifier: P and D prefixes for paintings and drawings, PND and DND for undated works, sequential within each year.
- Scholarly ordering: Sort by the year in the UID, never by a free-text year field that may contain a range like 1844–1850.
- Controlled access: Some galleries are password-protected for researchers; the public sees the introduction, biography and methodology.
- An editor who can trust the save button: A hand-corrected date must survive the next save.
The plugin
How the catalogue is modelled
Works are posts with a UID meta field and derived year fields. Sixteen decade categories, eight for paintings and eight for drawings, are hard-coded in the plugin, along with a handful of non-catalogue categories for doubtful attributions and unknown supports that never render on the front end. A function decides whether a post is a drawing by checking category membership first and the UID prefix second, and the gallery sort extracts the year from the UID before falling back to meta, because meta can hold ranges and PHP casts "1844-1850" to 1844.
Search, galleries and the single view
The protected-gallery shortcode handles password authentication, the category grid and the artwork grid with UID sorting. An AJAX handler serves exact-year and keyword search from script.js. A custom single template renders each work with a Slick slider for its images. In June 2026 we added a second catalogue as a separate custom post type with its own hierarchical category taxonomy, gallery and search shortcodes, AJAX action and permalink base, sharing the keyword taxonomy so cross-catalogue keyword browsing works. Auto-categorisation for the new type looks terms up by slug, so the editor creates the decade terms once and the plugin does the rest.
The forensic audit
In April 2026 the client reported that corrections made months earlier had disappeared from the drawings. That is the worst kind of bug report for an archive: no error, no timestamp, just missing scholarship. We treated it as an investigation rather than a fix.
Who changed what
What it turned out to be
The real bug
The fix and the safety net
A drawing with any non-empty first_year, typed by the editor, set by an import, set by a prior backfill, is never overwritten by the save hook. Full stop.
— Fix report, 15 April 2026
How the site is run
Where it stands
What we can and cannot claim
The catalogue is live at julesbreton.com, in French. The published-post count comes from the project documentation; the category, plugin-size and commit counts are taken from the repository. The site's visual design and its page-builder layouts predate our engagement; our scope is the custom catalogue plugin, deployment discipline, the audit and fix described above, and ongoing maintenance. We have no analytics access for this client and make no traffic claims.
What This Project Does Well
Technologies Used
WordPress 6.9 on Hostinger with LiteSpeed Cache and the host CDN, PHP, a single-file custom plugin (jules-breton-master-4) with templates, script.js and style.css, ACF Pro, Elementor and JS Composer, Slick slider on single-artwork views, Simple History, WP-CLI, MySQL, deployment by SCP
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