LearnLab is an e-learning service that already existed and already had users. INFIGO’s job was to move it onto WordPress without losing any of it.
01 · The context
A migration is judged by what goes missing.
Rebuilding a platform that is already running is a different job from building one. Nobody notices the parts that survived. What gets noticed is the article that lost its images, the page whose URL changed and stopped ranking, the language version that came back shorter than it went in.
That is the real specification for work like this, and it is rarely the one written down: everything that existed still exists, in the right language, at a sensible address.
02 · The build
A designer’s interface, built out, with the content carried across.
The new interface came from a designer and was implemented rather than reinterpreted. Underneath it, the substance of the project was two things.
The content migration. All of it, moved across rather than re-entered, which for a learning service means the material people actually pay for and cannot afford to have quietly degrade in the move.
Multisite, for the languages. The service runs in many languages, and that is exactly the case WordPress Multisite is for: one installation, one codebase, one set of updates, with each language a site of its own rather than a translation layer draped over a single site. Adding a language becomes a site in the network instead of a rebuild, and a fix lands everywhere at once.
03 · The long haul
Handed on.
The site has since been taken over by somebody else and now runs on a different platform. That happens, and a migration done properly is one of the things that makes it possible: content that was moved cleanly once can be moved cleanly again.
What we delivered
- Migration of a running e-learning service onto WordPress.
- A designer’s interface built out as specified.
- Full content migration, nothing re-entered by hand.
- WordPress Multisite serving the service in many languages from one installation.
