I was elected as a member of the executive committee of Malaysian Book Publishers Association (MABOPA) in 2019. When I joined the exco, the then website was developed using ExpressionEngine 1.7.3, a framework that has not been heard of for a very long time.
The old website did not have a mobile layout, and was filled with spams. I have spent a good few days to clean up and extract all the member information before building a new one.
Having discussed with the then-president and secretary (current president), we decided to go for WordPress as we could easily find available developer to maintain it.
Since we didn’t have many pictures to use, our new design focused on typography instead, which aimed to create a bold statement you don’t usually see in ‘regular’ WordPress websites.
The new website features a dark theme and a responsive UI.
While trying to restore the member list, I tested a few directory-related WordPress plugins but none was satisfactory. Being a WordPress plugin means that they are often very dependant on the data structure of WordPress itself, which will be messy when we need to export them later.
Member data is the core of our website, it must be kept in the simplest way possible to be future-proof.
With that in mind, I had resorted to write a custom WordPress plugin to list and display our member details.
To let the admin staff updates our member details, another platform was then quickly developed with UI built upon the Bootstrap framework. It isn’t quite good looking but it is functional. More updates are being carried out.