Fields of Thunder Museum

Fields of Thunder is a private military history museum preserving U.S. Army life from the Civil War through the Spanish American War, with select WWII acquisitions. The project was a complete front-end redesign, migrating the site from Divi to a custom Bricks Builder implementation with a bespoke design language built around the museum's parchment, brass, and ink aesthetic.

The site covers the museum's full collection across artillery, rapid fire weapons, limbers and wagons, uniforms, small arms, various artifacts, WWII vehicles and artifacts, and restoration projects. Each section uses a consistent gallery system with GLightbox integration, rich history text, and period photography. A separate Sunshop-powered webstore handles merchandise sales.

The Challenge

The existing Divi site had accumulated years of content additions and corrections with no consistent visual language, making it feel cluttered and dated. The client also needed a dedicated Artifact Liquidation section where individual items could be listed with downloadable PDF spec sheets — something the old platform couldn't support cleanly.

Our Approach

We rebuilt the entire site in Bricks Builder using a custom child theme with a shared CSS design system — typography, color tokens, gallery components, and navigation — all defined once and applied consistently across every page. A custom post type (fot_liquidation) was built into the child theme to manage artifact listings, each with an attached PDF, rendered via a shortcode on the liquidation page. The go-live migration was handled entirely via WP-CLI and direct DB import scripts, with image assets synced from the preview environment to the live server.

Results

The redesigned site launched with a fully consistent visual identity, all historical content preserved and extended with new images and text corrections provided by the client. The artifact liquidation section went live with five listings and downloadable PDFs. The Sunshop webstore was updated with a matching custom theme. The client now has a maintainable, extensible platform that reflects the quality and depth of the collection.

Project Screenshots

Project Details

Client

Fields of Thunder Museum

Category

WordPress

Year

2026

Tech Stack

WordPress Bricks Builder PHP MySQL Sunshop WP-CLI Custom Child Theme

Live Site

fieldsofthunder.com →