CKISS

Nobody was maintaining the old WordPress site. It had become the dumping ground for everything CKISS: species information, events, programs, reports, and years of announcements, all sharing one undifferentiated pile.

Because the blog was the only publishing tool available, it had become the channel for everything. Staff wrote the same information twice, sometimes three times, so it would appear in each of the places a reader might look. Keeping the site alive would have meant paying a developer by the hour every month, on top of the plugin upkeep WordPress demands whether or not anything is published.

A React application on Supabase, with an admin app the staff own. Species, programs, events, publications, the board, job postings and the annual priority list are each their own thing with their own editor — not a blog post pretending to be one.

Every change is recorded in an append-only audit log written by the database itself, so the society can always see who changed what. Old WordPress URLs still resolve: anything a partner, funder or search engine had linked to over the previous decade was mapped to its new home rather than left to break.

Between three and five staff now publish directly to the live site. No developer sits between the society and its own information, and no content change waits on someone else's schedule.

The annual cycle of information the society publishes now has a structure built for it, so each item is written once and lives in one place instead of being re-entered wherever it might be needed.