High-load community content platform

A media platform for a worldwide Orthodox community: news, podcasts, topics with deep dives, book reviews and much more. It came to us for a redesign and restructuring, and we replaced the page builder with a new content ecosystem.

Task

The platform carried heavy traffic and a large volume of content in many formats, all built on a page builder. It needed a redesign to the new layouts and a restructuring of the content, following the patterns set by the project concept, while staying fast and secure.

What I built

• A new ecosystem in place of the existing page builder, built to the design layouts and the patterns of the project concept.
• Content split into separate entities and types: articles, news, podcasts, video, topics, book reviews.
• Content migration for a large archive already indexed by search engines and saved by users: moved without pain, with no loss of SEO positions and no broken permalinks.
• Semi-automated filling of the video and short video sections: the YouTube API reads descriptions and other parameters of existing videos from the project’s own channels, then each item goes through pre-screening and a semi-manual check and is published with its category and classification.
• Integration with podcast platforms.
• Elasticsearch for search, with a filtering system.
• Maximum caching for heavy traffic.
• Search engine optimisation.
• Dockerized system with an extra-level security approach: a dedicated department reviewed every change before it went to production, for security and soundness, so the platform met the highest requirements for high-load and security-critical systems.
• Other enterprise best practices for a high-load project.

How it went

The most important part was migration. On an enterprise project with a large archive, the existing content was already in the search index and in users’ saved items. We had to move all of it to the new structure without losing SEO positions or permalinks, and at the same time fill the new video sections from the existing YouTube channels.

Result

The platform went from a website with a huge amount of content on a page builder to a branched newspaper infrastructure for the community, built for a high-load audience. The archive moved to the new structure with no loss of SEO positions and no broken permalinks, and the video sections are filled from the YouTube channels in a semi-automated flow.