Publishing without a manual
A regional legislature's site, moved from a legacy CMS to a static site with a small publishing panel.
- Role
- Everything except part of the frontend
- Time
- 3 months
- Stack
- Astro · Cloudflare Workers · D1 · R2
- Team
- With a frontend collaborator
Problem
The site ran on a legacy CMS I no longer trusted, and nobody would maintain it after delivery.
Constraints
- It has to run on a free tier.
- No maintainer after delivery.
- It is designed so an official can publish a document in under two minutes without a manual; if a user test fails, the panel gets cut, a manual never gets written.
Decisions
- Chose a static site with a small publishing panel over another CMS, so there is nothing left to patch after delivery.
- Tested every historical URL before the cutover and shipped the redirects as static rules.
- Added a build valve, where counters widen the build interval and hard-cap builds under the host's monthly limit, because intervals alone would overshoot under steady publishing.
- Made a failed build keep the previous version live, so a publication from the panel can never put a broken page online.
Outcome
Live in 2026, running on a free tier.
- 6,585 historical URLs tested
- 587 redirects
- About 280,000 internal links, 0 broken
Credits
A frontend collaborator worked on part of the project.