A bilingual platform of videos about contemporary art was running on a WordPress install nobody had updated in years. Some plugins were paid for, others dated back to the days of Flash. The only person who knew how it all held together was gone.
The website worked. Nobody knew what the next update would break, though, and there was no one left to ask.
Rebuild, but lose nothing
Patching the old website would only have postponed the same problem. So we rebuilt the platform on open technology that doesn’t belong to one vendor and that anyone in the field understands.
Losing nothing mattered as much as building the new website. We migrated all of the content: over fifteen years of archive, thousands of videos and articles in Czech and English. Today it makes up roughly nine in ten posts on the platform.
We redirected the old addresses, so links from other websites still work and search engines didn’t have to learn the platform from scratch.
- 2021Takeover and building the new platform
- 2022New platform live, old addresses redirected
- 2022User accounts and playlists
- 2025New version of the website and our own player
- todayStill developing and running it
A paid player that added nothing
The website paid a licence for a commercial video player that did nothing a free, open one can’t. We replaced it with our own player built on open source, with subtitles, quality selection and picture-in-picture. The licence went.
Search and user accounts
The new search shows results as you type and searches in whichever language the viewer asks in. Viewers can also create an account and save videos to their own playlists.
The archive keeps growing
Everything published on the platform since 2006 is still there. The chart shows how the archive grew: the grey part is content we migrated from the old website, the light part is what has been added on the new platform.
Never again in one head
All of the code is in git, including the server configuration and deployment. If the platform ever has to be handed over to someone else, it won’t be archaeology, just an ordinary handover.
There’s been no reason to yet. We keep developing and running the platform so it never goes that stale again.