Modernizing Trust for Mutual Understanding to bridge cultures through technology

Moving away from WordPress

WordPress is an excellent tool for regular websites and blogs with its massive plugin ecosystem and extensive community support. However, like with many things where software is involved, there is no definite good or bad choice; rather, it is a good or bad choice for your specific use case/needs. Our client wanted to reduce the maintenance overhead that came with their WordPress website and was looking for a faster, more secure, easier-to-use alternative.

After having their brand identity freshly renewed, Trust for Mutual Understanding wanted their website to reflect the changes and serve as a central hub of their operations. That is when they reached out to us to help them bring their new design, vision and ideas for the website to life.

In the initial discovery discussions, it turned out they aren't really satisfied with their current web page, not just in terms of look but rather in the performance and management side of things. Their experience was similar to most WordPress site owners:

• Having to constantly update the engine in order to avoid security issues, which often leads to plugins breaking and multiple hours of work.
• When you need anything custom, you need to hunt for a plugin that presents another chance of introducing a security vulnerability, often involving a monthly payment, and even then, it is not always perfect for your use case.
• Slow load times.
• Content editing is not as straightforward as it could be. Especially when lots of plugins are involved.

Working around the clock

Working with an overseas client is all about time zone control. Once you find a suitable overlap between your time zones, the rest is business as usual. Since there was a 7-hour difference between our geographic locations, we agreed to have sync meetings between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM EST, which was 16:00 - 19:00 at our location.

Other than live calls, the usual offline communication took place over email. For closer collaborations, we usually use dedicated Slack channels for real-time messages.

Choosing the stack

Although a few requirements we distilled from the new design were unique enough to consider a custom-tailored website, it would have been an unreasonable expense on their part.

One of levoolab's core philosophies is to help our clients achieve their goals in the shortest way (sometimes measured in cost, other times in time, etc.) possible, not to convince them to commit to the latest shiny and trending technology. Technology needs to serve the client, not the other way around. That is why we always try to find the right tool for the right job, and in this case, it was Statamic, a content management system built on the Laravel framework.

Statamic allowed us to quickly rebuild TMU's content in a familiar environment but, most importantly, came with features such as automatic APIs for data querying and a beautiful, consistent, user-friendly control panel to manage the website's content.

For the special cases where they wanted a more interactive interface, we introduced Vue.js to the system, where the auto-generated data APIs became extremely useful.

From the ground up

We managed to reconstruct their data model with lightning speed while bringing in one of Statamic's most valued features: a custom-tailored but uniform control panel to manage all aspects of the website.

Site building was also a straightforward and fast process, with a few exceptions where we had to cross Statamic's antler templating engine with Vue.js for highly interactive, in-place loading user interfaces.

Legacy data migration to a new system is always a challenging task, especially when the source and destination are so distinct in every aspect, e.g., HTML text saved in a database vs custom structured YAML stored in markdown files. Migrating all the necessary posts with their related attachments was the most difficult aspect of this project. With the help of the Laravel ecosystem and some custom-written migration scripts, we managed to migrate all the posts made in the past 16 years while ensuring no content renders with a broken asset on the new website.

Shipping

Within just a few weeks, the client already had an up-and-running version of the new website with their brand new identity, improved performance and security, a custom but extremely user-friendly administrative panel, and the infinite possibility of custom functionalities.

As a bonus, we also managed to reduce maintenance costs by getting rid of all the premium plugins and the frequent need for maintenance.

What started as a design change turned out to be a perfect opportunity for TMU to solve their long overdue issues with their website so they can spend less time maintaining it and more time doing what they do best: supporting artists and environmental activists around the world.