ECCK

The European Chamber of Commerce in Korea represents European business to the Korean government. Its site is not a brochure — it carries advocacy positions, a members directory, an events programme with paid tickets, publications and a steady stream of news, and its readers include the people the chamber is lobbying.

We were brought in because it kept falling over. It was slow on a good day and down on a bad one. For an organisation that depends on being trusted, that is more than a technical problem.

So it was rebuilt, not patched. Dependencies are declared in code instead of uploaded through a browser, so what is running is known and an update is a reviewable change. Media moved off the application server entirely. A Redis object cache took the repeated database work out of every page load, and a page cache took most requests away from PHP altogether. None of that is clever. It is the ordinary set of things a site like this should have had from the start, done properly.

On top of it sits the part that is specific to a chamber: a members directory built as a tested plugin of its own instead of a pile of template hacks, event ticketing with RSVPs and QR codes at the door, and the publications library.

Six years and counting, still shipping. The site the chamber outgrew is kept as a separate archive instead of being thrown away.