A decade of municipal records, off Joomla
A municipality's notices, decisions and documents moved off an unmaintainable Joomla onto WordPress it has published on itself since 2022 — without the old addresses going dead.
- Kind
- Migration and maintenance
- Year
- 2022
- Service line
- Business digitalisation
- For
- Općina Kravarsko, Zagreb County
- Scope
- Joomla migration, rebuilt navigation, separate section for the municipal utility
- Built with
- WordPress, PHP
- Duration
- A few months; maintained annually since
- Live site
- kravarsko.hr (opens in a new tab)
The brief
Kravarsko Municipality ran on a Joomla install that by 2022 was too old to maintain. It could no longer be safely updated, and publishing — something a municipality does continuously by law, from budgets and public procurement to tenders and the spatial plan — had become slow enough that some material never made it onto the site at all.
Underneath that site sat eleven years of archive: hundreds of posts more than five years old, and around 50 GB of documents and mail. That set the real constraint on the job. A municipality is a public authority and its publications are official records, so nothing was allowed to disappear — every address published across a decade of official notices had to keep resolving to the same thing. The work was a direct award.
What we built
The content moved to WordPress whole: posts, pages and the entire document archive, along with the mail and the hosting. The navigation was not transplanted as it stood but rebuilt, because the old structure was part of why documents were hard to reach. The municipal utility company got its own section of the site with its own menu.
The old addresses were covered by redirects, so a link in an old letter or on someone else's page still opens the same document. Alongside that went the things that keep a public body's site standing for more than one year: a hardened install, IP blocking, two-factor sign-in, rotating passwords, and a regular backup regime including database backups at the hosting level. Accessibility is served by a tool for text size, contrast and readability, next to the accessibility statement the municipality publishes; a formal WCAG audit was not in scope.
What it does now
The municipality has published for itself ever since. Notices, budget documents, tenders and council acts go up without a developer in the middle — where before, publishing cost a great deal of time and some of it never happened.
The site has run since 2022 and is maintained every year. The archive is still at its own addresses: a public call published in 2016 opens on the link it was published under. No figure is quoted here because there was no before-and-after measurement — the result that can be checked is a system the municipality took over in 2022 and has run itself ever since.
- WordPress
- Migration
- Redirects
- Public sector
