ETS content inventory

Working research for the ETS27 site redesign. Gathered on 2026-10-13 from public sources only. Nothing was written to any of them.

Companion files: ets-data-model.md (proposed schema, source mapping, concierge questions) and ../prototype/data/ets.sample.json (render fixture).

1. Method

Browsers opened for this research were closed afterwards. robots.txt declares Crawl-delay: 10; the single pass over 91 speaker pages was a one-off, and the build should read REST and Whova snapshots, not scrape HTML.

2. Findings that change the plan

Read these first. Items 1 to 5 differ from, or go beyond, the working assumptions in the project brief.

1. The WordPress "Speaker" records are the ETS25 archive, not the ETS26 lineup. The 91 portfolio records are tagged ets25 (90), ets24 (41), speakers-23 (35), speakers (69), featured (8) and tloy (1). There is no ets26 category. Records were created 2019-08 to 2025-05 and last edited 2025-08-27.
2. The ETS26 lineup and agenda live in Whova, not WordPress. /lineup/ and /agenda/ contain no speaker or session text in WordPress at all, only Whova embed widgets (a 900 px iframe each). The data is public JSON on whova.com: 147 speakers and 68 sessions. Whova sends no CORS headers, so only a server-side job can read it.
3. ETS27 is already announced and on sale. The live home page hero (Content Block 78148, "Free Your Mind Header", edited 2026-08-11) reads "FREE YOUR MIND ... coming soon May 3-6, 2027 | Austin, Tx" with an ETS27 Eventbrite button. Eventbrite lists the 14th ETS flagship, Monday May 3 to Thursday May 6, 2027, 8 AM to 5:30 PM, on sale since 2026-06-17, four ticket classes from $320.89 to $1,227.91 including fees, no refunds.
4. ETS27 is four calendar days (Mon to Thu), not three. ETS23, 24, 25 and 26 all ran Monday to Thursday by their published dates, and Thursday was a half day in ETS23 (ends 1:00 PM), ETS24 (about 12:15 PM) and ETS26 (12:30 PM); the ETS25 agenda is not on the site. The fixture models four days.
5. Job title and organization are not in the REST output. They are Uncode dynamic tokens, {company-title} and {company-name}, backed by custom fields that REST does not expose (meta returns only footnotes and a MonsterInsights flag). content.rendered is raw, unexecuted WPBakery shortcode with the tokens unresolved. Only the bio survives inside [vc_column_text]. Recovery used the rendered page (<span class="company-title">, <span class="company-name">). The durable fix is register_post_meta(..., 'show_in_rest' => true) on the portfolio type.
6. Roles change between editions. Of the 147 ETS26 speakers, 35 match an ETS25 WordPress record by name, and many changed employer or title (for example Raiford Smith: AES to Google; Carlos Ayala: NiSource to Mentora; Damali Harding: Regulatory Assistance Project to Amendment Nine). A speaker row must be per edition, with a stable person behind it.
7. Stale, demo and broken content is live. See section 4 and section 11. The most visible: the home page meta description still says "ETS25 | Ethos | May 19-21 2025", every title tag ends with the tagline "hack_the_planet [INITIATE]", /about/ is an unedited Uncode demo template, and /sponsor/ still says "start@ETS19".
8. Whova data is thin where a concierge needs depth. 43 of 147 speakers have a bio, 47 of 147 have only a generic avatar, 9 of 68 sessions have a description, 22 have a room, none have tags, and the 8 Whova "tracks" are formats (Keynote, Panel ...), not themes.
9. The venue is not announced. Eventbrite shows only the location name "Austin" with a street pin (713 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701). Treat the pin as unconfirmed.
10. The only sponsor facts are logos. 39 logos in six tiers; alt text and links are empty, so names came from file names.

3. System map

4. Page by page

21 WordPress pages plus archives. Scope labels: ETS27, ETS26, Evergreen, Archive (past edition, still true), Stale (wrong now), Junk (not ETS content).

The REST API lists no other published pages. Sitemaps exist for post, page, portfolio, portfolio_category, page_category and author.

5. Global chrome

• Header nav (live): About (#about), Gallery, Partners, 2026 Lineup, Agenda, Hotel & Venue, Contact, ETS25 Speakers (/ets25/#lineup), Register (button, ETS27 Eventbrite).
• Footer: newsletter email field with Subscribe (Mailchimp), a countdown block whose static HTML reads "000 days 00 hours 00 minutes 00 seconds" (JavaScript-driven, not verified in a browser), links Speak (/contact/?opt=Nominate Thought Leader), Sponsor (/contact/?opt=Sponsor), Partners, Gallery, Contact, LoFi (YouTube playlist), six social icons (Facebook, X, YouTube, Google+ which is dead, Instagram, Mailchimp), "(c) Zpryme".
• SEO: the site title and tagline are "hack_the_planet [INITIATE]" and are appended to every <title>. The home page meta description and one of two Open Graph blocks say "ETS25 | Ethos | May 19-21 2025"; the second Open Graph block has the ETS26 description. There is no usable social image on the home page.
• Analytics: GA4 through MonsterInsights.
• Navigation is not available over REST. /wp-json/wp/v2/menus and /menu-items return 401 to anonymous callers.

6. WordPress REST: what it exposes

6.1 Endpoints

Cross-origin: access-control-allow-origin echoes the caller's Origin with credentials allowed, so a browser can call WordPress REST from another origin. Responses carry cache-control: max-age=600, served via Cloudflare.

6.2 portfolio (speaker) field mapping

Parsing recipe for content.rendered: decode HTML entities; replace the texturized quote characters that WordPress turned the shortcode delimiters into (U+201C, U+201D and U+2033) with plain quotes; take the text inside [vc_column_text ...] ... [/vc_column_text]; strip tags. Result: 77 of 91 records have a bio (median 158 words, range 40 to 360). The other 14 contain only the template (about 2,000 characters) and no bio. back_image inside [vc_row] is the header background image id; vc_single_image dynamic="yes" means "use the featured image".

6.3 Speaker categories (50 terms)

The ETS23 child terms are the only structured speaker-to-session link in WordPress, and they cover 2023 only. One record (Hebah Bukhari) is ETS23-only; 40 are ETS25-only.

7. Speakers: two sources

Whova speakers by session count: 24 have none, 109 have one, 11 have two, 2 have three, 1 has six. Whova flags 12 "highlight speakers"; all have two or more sessions (14 speakers do), including Zpryme CEO Jason Rodriguez, who has six.

Data-quality items seen in these sources:

• Typos and whitespace: "VP< Chief Data and AI Officer", "Chief Enterprise Architect,", trailing spaces on company names, "Cody ONeil".
• An HTML entity inside a Whova bio ('), so strip and decode all Whova text.
• Name variants across sources: Chima and Chimaobi Chijioke, Rudy D. and Rudy Garza, Kimberly M. and Kimberly Britton, Jason M. and Jason Ryan, H.G. and H G Chissell, Hillary Scott-Ogunrinde and Scott-Ogunride. A person key needs an alias list.
• Whova loc is free text, sometimes a street address, a company, or "Nashville,New York,Ohio". Do not display it raw.
• Janie Gonzalez's title and organization are swapped between WordPress and Whova.
• All WordPress speaker images have empty alt text.

8. Agenda structure actually used

8.1 ETS26 (Whova)

• Shape: four days, 68 sessions, timezone America/Chicago.

• Formats. Whova calls them "tracks"; they describe format, not topic.

• Parallel sessions: Tuesday 13:30 (Breakouts A, B, C) and 14:15 (D, F); Wednesday 13:30 (G, H, I) and 14:15 (J, K, L). Breakout E does not exist in the data.
• Rooms: only 22 of 68 sessions carry a place. Named: Super Hornet Conference Room, Globemaster Conference Room, Capital Factory (breakouts); Westin Navarro Main Ballroom A, 2nd floor (all Thursday sessions); Westin Olivares Room (Tuesday reception); Acenar (Wednesday reception); Howl at the Moon appears in the Monday reception title.
• Evening receptions: three (Mon, Tue, Wed), sponsor named in the title or description text. The structured sponsors array is empty on every session.
• Daily rhythm: breakfast, short keynotes and talks, panels and fireside chats, lunch, breakouts or panels, networking break, ETS Talks and panels, reception.
• People on a session: roles "Speakers" and "Moderator". Of 521 person-to-session links, 76 are moderators.
• Descriptions, tags, programs, documents: descriptions on 9 sessions; tags, programs and documents on none.
• Whova type code: 1 for 66 sessions, 10 for the first two receptions, but the third reception is 1. Do not use it to classify.

8.2 ETS23 and ETS24 (WordPress)

The agenda was typed into Monday-Thursday tabs as lines of "time | title | room" with names and affiliations below. ETS24 marketing framed the event as Imagine, Dream, Create, and used five themes (Decarbonization, Resilience, Equity, Analysis, Modernization) as labels on panels and fireside chats ("Analysis Panel", "Resilience Fireside Chat", "Equity Panel", "Decarbonization Fireside Chat"). ETS23 and ETS24 opened Monday with the EnergyTech University Prize pitch event and workshops. ETS26 dropped the thematic labels, added Town Hall and Feature Short-Doc formats (neither word appears in the ETS23 or ETS24 agendas), and moved to Whova.

9. Sponsors

• Tiers on /partners/ (display order): Platinum (2), Vanguard (1), Trident (1), Gold (10), Silver (8), Bronze (17). 39 logos. Vanguard and Trident look like single-slot named tiers. The page does not state prices or benefits.
• What is on the page: a logo image per sponsor, no alt text, no link, no description. Names in the fixture come from file names (for example bidgley-uai-258x194.jpg) and are cross-checked against ETS26 speaker affiliations and session text; name_confidence marks the uncertain ones (EDO, Bloom, Vision, Bridgewater, Motive and NPUC, ELM, NVIDIA and Oracle).
• Other sponsorship roles: exclusive sustainability sponsor (SEW, on /sustainability-promise/); ETS26 opening reception (SBS), Day 2 reception (Sendero), Wednesday lunch (Itron), named only in session text.
• Image sizes: logos are Uncode -uai-258x155 and -uai-258x194 crops; the originals live at the same path without the suffix.
• Inquiry flow: the form on /partners/ (interest: Media, Sponsor, Partner, Other), the /sponsor/ form, and /contact/?opt=Sponsor. The copy promises "a personalized campaign" and says "leading up to April".

10. Registration and get-involved flows

ETS27 ticket classes as read on 2026-10-13 (prices include Eventbrite fees; base price is price minus fee):

What a ticket includes is not published.

11. ETS26-specific versus evergreen

12. Gaps ETS27 must fill

Prior Austin context that may help: ETS23 was at Hotel ZaZa, Austin; the ETS24 pages reviewed do not name a venue.

13. Headless path

The WordPress site can stay the CMS and the new front end can read it over REST. That works only if four things are done:

1. Expose what REST hides. Register the company-title and company-name fields (and a TLOY field) on the portfolio type with show_in_rest, and add a public endpoint for navigation. Without the first change, the front end must scrape rendered pages.
2. Add an Event record. Today the ETS27 dates, city and Register link exist only inside a WPBakery shortcode in Content Block 78148 and in Eventbrite. A small Event options page or custom post type (dates, city, venue, hotel, ticket URL, status) exposed over REST becomes the one place staff edit those facts.
3. Treat Whova as the lineup and agenda system of record, read server-side. A scheduled job fetches the two public endpoints, normalizes them (decode text, role mapping, type mapping), validates, and writes a snapshot the front end reads. The snapshot is a derived cache, not a second editable copy. The endpoints are undocumented but public, with no CORS, so ask Zpryme whether an official Whova API credential is available before relying on them in production.
4. Read ticket facts deliberately. Eventbrite shows tiers only inside its checkout panel. If the organizer has an Eventbrite API token, use it; otherwise mirror the tier table into the Event record by hand.

Operating principles:

• Human-operable parity. Staff keep editing speakers, FAQ, venue and hotel in WordPress and the agenda in Whova. The front end and the concierge read the same records and never keep a competing copy.
• Caching. REST is cacheable for 600 seconds; use incremental revalidation and a webhook on publish.
• Images. Serve through an image resizer. Several originals are 0.4 to 1.4 MB.
• Concierge payload. The full fixture is about 200 KB. Do not paste it into a prompt; a lean snapshot (ids, names, titles, orgs, session titles and times, sponsors, ticket classes, FAQ) is about 31.6 KB, roughly 8,000 tokens by a characters-divided-by-four estimate. Recipe in ets-data-model.md section 5.1.

14. Reproduction notes

All URLs are public. The Whova event ids below are public embed identifiers from the page source.

WordPress   https://energythoughtsummit.com/wp-json/wp/v2/portfolio?per_page=50&page=1&_fields=id,slug,title,content,excerpt,featured_media,portfolio_category,date,link,menu_order,modified
            https://energythoughtsummit.com/wp-json/wp/v2/portfolio_category?per_page=100
            https://energythoughtsummit.com/wp-json/wp/v2/pages?per_page=50&_fields=id,slug,title,link,parent,menu_order,modified,status
            https://energythoughtsummit.com/wp-json/wp/v2/uncodeblock/78148
Whova       https://whova.com/xems/apis/event_webpage/speaker/public/get_speaker_webpage_data/?event_id=r4mBuGC626Esj8gQSgbHcrXZruHCw5gTny4Uh8CMiKU%3D
            https://whova.com/xems/apis/event_webpage/agenda/public/get_agendas/?event_id=SX1lc1KEBY2FSjxT1zzey0KCp4cyMTC%403Zg0EYVuZxY%3D
Eventbrite  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ets27-tickets-1997048303234
            https://www.eventbrite.com/e/api/1997048303234/ticket-information (called by the page; returns class count, price range, sale window)

The speaker widget and the agenda widget use two different embed ids; both resolve to the event named "Energy Thought Summit (ETS) 2026". The fixture builder joined speakers to sessions through the Whova session id, kept in each fixture session under source.whova_session_id.