An Algerian charity founded in 2002, in the oasis of El Goléa. It runs a
library, a charity centre, an eco-park and guest houses. I delivered the
full public website, a back office the team uses on its own, and a
database migration carried out without taking the service down.
The team had to go through an outside contractor to publish the smallest
piece of news.
The charity has more than twenty years of activity, four operations to
run, and donors, sponsors and visitors to look after. Nobody inside could
change the website. A photo to swap, a date to correct, an announcement to
publish: each request went outside and waited its turn.
Its audience is spread across Algeria, France and the diaspora, and does
not read the same language from one country to the next. A site published
in a single language therefore left out part of the donor base, whichever
language was chosen.
02
What I built
The public site
The site presents the charity and its four operations. It carries the news
with one page per article, a donation page, a sponsorship flow, a stay
booking, a contact form and the legal pages that collecting personal data
requires. Everything is rendered on the server, so each page is indexable
by search engines and displays correctly when someone shares it.
The back office
The team has a protected area to follow donations, sponsorship requests and
bookings, and to manage the content of the site. Data administration is
generic: one list, create, edit and delete mechanism serves
every entity, instead of rewriting the same screen for each type of
record.
The languages
Translation is handled on the server, with a central dictionary and
metadata of its own for each language. Each language has its own addresses
and its own pages, which gives it its own search ranking.
The migration
The old system ran on Firebase. I moved everything to PostgreSQL: a
full export of what existed, a transformation into the new schema,
timestamped backups before and after the operation, a record count on each
side. The site stayed online for the whole switch and no data was lost.
03
What was hard
Migrating a live database
A migration is run as a procedure, with steps you can check one at a time.
Moving from a document model to a relational model forces you to settle
questions that stayed vague for years. What exactly is a sponsorship?
What do you do with a donor recorded without an address?
My working rule is always the same: back up before, back up after,
count the records on both sides, and keep the ability to return to the
previous state at every step. That last condition is what allows the switch
to be run on the real database rather than on a copy.
Handling languages from the design stage
When translation is added afterwards, the visible content goes through but
the metadata stays in the original language, and search engines only ever
see one version of the site. Deciding up front that each language has its
own addresses costs a little more work at the start and saves rebuilding
everything later.
Designing for volunteers
The back office is used by volunteers, not by people trained on the tool.
Input is validated strictly and error messages are written in everyday
French. A wrong move cannot break a public page. The labels use the
charity's own vocabulary, and the team publishes its news
without going through me.
What I take from it
A charity on a tight budget cannot pay a contractor every time a photo
needs changing. So I treated the team's autonomy as a project
requirement on the same level as the features: the back office and
its wording were designed to be used without me.
04
The stack
SiteNext.js, directory-based routing, server rendering, light animations
DataSupabase and PostgreSQL, with server and client access kept separate
MigrationFirestore export, transformation into the relational schema, timestamped backups, record counts
AdministrationProtected area, tracking for donations, sponsorships and bookings, generic content administration
LanguagesServer-side translation, central dictionary, metadata per language
FormsSchema validation, error messages written for volunteers
ComplianceLegal notices, privacy policy, data collection kept to what is needed
A site to rebuild, a database to move?
An ageing site, a vendor who left, data stuck in an old system. Describe
the situation and I'll tell you what the takeover involves, in work and in
time.
