Author Managed Designs extended the Bender Builds system to give WordPress theme authors on ThemeForest direct control over their hosted demos. Previously, theme bundling was an internal process — staff had to configure and package each theme. This project opened a limited version of the Build Control Panel to authors themselves, letting them provision demo sites, customize the WordPress installation to showcase their theme, and export the result for use on the Envato Hosted platform.
I helped ship the control panel and built the archiving system that packages an author’s customized demo site into a deployable archive. This was the evolution of the bundling concept from Pressed Bundles through Bender Builds — each iteration gave more control to the people closest to the content, moving from internal-only to author self-service.