Tatromaniak – website redesign for Tatra Mountains enthusiasts

These are the website projects that bring us the most joy. Tatromaniak.pl is a website that brings together enthusiasts of one of the most beautiful corners of Poland - the Tatra Mountains. The site currently has around 300,000 fans on Facebook, a very active community, and several thousand articles on the website.

Tatromaniak website project

We started with meetings where we discussed the nature of the new portal and the specific preparations that needed to be made before we could start programming the site.

The portal owner - Krzysztof Baraniak, after many observations, concluded that Facebook's recent policy negatively affects the page's visibility and hinders community development. Moreover, there are no signs that the Silicon Valley giant will change its business practices, which are primarily focused on effective monetization. Together, we concluded that the ideal solution would be to transfer some of Facebook's functionality to independent ground - to their own website.

Website redesign and rebranding

We started with a gentle rebranding to give the new portal a cohesive and refreshed character. Tatromaniak.pl already had a website and logo. The original logo was created by Wojciech Kulesza. The idea was so interesting and catchy that we decided to keep it and just refresh the logo itself.

Next, we created a general concept for the new portal look:

Agnieszka from AD STUDIO, with whom we constantly collaborate, was responsible for the redesign. The project was maintained in black and red colors, which clearly referred to the logo's colors and the Tatromaniak brand colors from the beginning of the portal's existence.

Dedicated server as the foundation of an extensive website

Another major challenge was ensuring adequate infrastructure to run a social portal on its own server. We had to ensure the portal's functioning during critical moments, such as when about 2,000 people start registering and actively using social functions at once. We concluded that the current shared hosting didn't fully meet our expectations and might not meet the challenge. Oktawave came to our aid, offering attractive cooperation terms in exchange for providing a dedicated server and help with configuration.

The graphic design was ready, infrastructure selected. Next, we could confidently think about implementation.

News module, WordPress

The previous Tatromaniak.pl was based on an old version of Drupal. We concluded that we don't need such an extensive environment to serve news. We thought about migrating to Grav, WordPress, or combining the news portal with the social portal. Grav CMS was eliminated early due to the upper limit of articles. Grav doesn't handle very large sites well, and our goal was to secure the portal's future and its continuous development.

Another option was migrating Drupal from an older version to a newer one, but the Drupal environment is quite specific, and the process of adapting old extensions to the newer version is quite slow in the Drupal ecosystem.

Finally, we chose WordPress due to its great flexibility and the possibility of almost perfect optimization. As a templating environment, we used Timber, which already offered initial content caching and incredible flexibility in creating templates based on Twig.

Community – phpFox

Initially, we thought about adopting BuddyPress for community purposes and combining it with WordPress, but the mess in this plugin's code definitely discouraged us. So we considered separate scripts as a community base. We had to choose from: phpFox, Social Engine, MooSocial, and other similar scripts. Each of them claimed to be a Facebook clone, although each was far from Facebook's functionality.

Finally, we chose phpFox. Not because it was the best. Mainly because it offered a solid base, code that could be freely modified, and the fact that the script is still regularly developed. phpFox looks good only on paper. It's a script that, despite its solid base, needs lots of improvements and enhancements. Our modification for Tatromaniak is a heavily improved version of the parent script, which is more stable and better organized.

Integration, RESTful API & OAuth 2.0

When we had the community and news module ready, it was time to integrate both solutions. At this point, we realized what a wonderful invention RESTful API is. It's a client-server communication method that enables information exchange between web applications. And so, thanks to using this method, we could display the latest news from WordPress on the community, and in the news portal, we could display the latest photos from the community.

Thanks to both scripts using OAuth, we could implement initial integration of both platforms and enable commenting on articles using a community account.

The future of our website projects

Thanks to using new technologies, we can confidently look to the future of Tatromaniak.pl. Creating a mobile application is not a challenge for us, adding new, interesting features to the community - neither. The solid infrastructure from Oktawave is prepared to handle much more traffic than those few thousand at once. We can confidently implement new, interesting ideas.

If you're interested in implementing your own social network modeled after Facebook, check out our offer for a personalized social network based on phpFox.