regio-energiegemeinschaft e.V.

November 11th, 2021

The previous website of the regio-energiegemeinschaft e.V. was based on an older version of the REDAXO CMS. The cumbersome operation and the outdated layout finally moved the association to commission a relaunch. The project was commissioned to me by the advertising agency Pixelwald and took almost three quarters of a year due to the data import and numerous individualizations. What lasts long, finally becomes good :)

Implementation

First, I had to understand the data situation within the existing CMS based on REDAXO. To do this, I pulled a local backup of the old website and evaluated the database. Then I wrote several SQL scripts, which spit out the data in a format that can be easily ported to WordPress as CSV.

The theme is based on the Avada theme builder, so the easy implementation of extensions had to be done optimally through shortcodes. Now it was time to develop the plugins, which provided the appropriate tasks and post types for the data to be imported:

Member

The main focus should be a member overview of the association. In this, the various types of members and supporters should be displayed and also listed searchable. As a basis, a custom post type for WordPress was created to be able to manage the members in the admin dashboard. I extended the Post Type with the plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) with required fields and optimized for the input in the backend.

For the frontend part I used a modern and performant JavaScript framework: Vue.js + TypeScript.

The whole thing was integrated by means of shortcode. By means of some parameters in the shortcode simple adjustments of the behavior could be made.

Events, News & Offers

On the pages of the regio-energiegemeinschaft e.V. various information for and from the members is offered. Among them are events, news and offers. For each of these content types I created a custom post type, which can output the articles as tiles at any place in WordPress using shortcode. I also extended these Post Types with useful and needed fields using ACF. Important for the association were functions like the simple move to a common archive and the function to be able to "pin" articles.

Archive

Before the move, the old website had an "Infothek" where all articles of the site were summarized. We have taken over this concept and conceptually renamed it Archive. Here you can find all articles, which are removed by means of the archive function on the other pages. Above the output of the articles we added a filter for easy narrowing of the output, if desired.

Also the archive can be inserted via shortcode anywhere in the frontend of WordPress as desired.

Team Member

At the end of the project, the client still wanted the ability to easily manage and display the board members within WordPress. For this purpose, a custom post type was extended using ACF and output with the JavaScript framework Vue.js. Corresponding shortcode can be included anywhere in the theme or widget.

To the project:

https://r-eg.de