Global Agriculture
Agriculture at a Crossroads
The Global Agriculture website documents the results of the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) process initiated by the World Bank and the UN. The report was published in 2008 after a multidisciplinary process about food and farming systems, with work spanning multiple years. The website collects all the results, providing downloadable reports and searchable online documentation.
While the project has had a number of additional reports published since then, the website is relatively static, providing an online record of the work done. The existing site had been running on TYPO3 for years and was hard to maintain.
The project was a full rebuild in WordPress, including a careful migration and cleanup of the TYPO3 content. A new structure and custom theme was built and hundreds of news and content pages, as well as thousands of media items were migrated. Additionally, the website was in English and German, with separate domains and we needed to keep the internal linking of content.
A large part of the work was manual: tidying up old entries, aligning metadata, and making sure that important links, downloads and references survived the move and landed in the right place. The result is a site that feels familiar to long‑time users, but runs on a much more stable and maintainable system.
Summary
Working on the new website was both challenging and interesting. The design itself was relatively quickly rebuilt, but the data migration required more time, due to differences in system architecture and the quantity of data.
