Industry Association
American Forest & Paper Association
A rebuild that replaced years of bolted-on structure with a content architecture designed to grow.
- Role
- Senior engineer (with Yes&)
- Duration
- Project-based
- Stack
- DrupalPHPMySQL
Full re-architecture
Scope
On estimate
Delivered
Background
The American Forest & Paper Association is the national trade association of the forest products industry: paper, packaging, pulp, and wood products manufacturers. Like every serious trade association, AF&PA speaks to two audiences at once: outward to policymakers and the public with industry data and policy positions, and inward to member companies with resources, statistics, and operational services.
Its previous site had done what association sites do: grown organically for years. New content types, navigation branches, and member workflows had been bolted on as needs arose, each addition locally sensible, the accumulated result increasingly hard to maintain or navigate.
Challenge
The rebuild had to serve as both an industry-data resource for policymakers and a member-facing operational platform without importing the old site's accumulated structure. The hard part of a rebuild is never the new software; it's deciding what the years of organic growth were trying to become, and designing that on purpose.
That meant untangling content that had been published under whatever type was available at the time, and replacing bolt-on navigation with an architecture that could absorb the next decade of additions without another rebuild.
Approach
Nikkio came in as senior engineer on the rebuild with Yes&. The first work was content-architectural: re-modeling types and taxonomies to reflect how AF&PA actually publishes: position papers, statistical releases, member communications, and event content as first-class types rather than variations of a generic page. Migration mapped the old organic sprawl into the new deliberate structure.
The build then focused on the same leverage pattern that serves small teams: integrations and reusable components assembled by editors, so landing pages and initiative microsites for major campaigns could be composed rather than commissioned. Performance work made the data-heavy pages (statistics, reports) load like the reference resource they're meant to be.
Results
AF&PA's team publishes on a platform whose structure matches its editorial reality: maintainable, fast, and organized the way the industry's information is actually consumed. The site continues to serve as the authoritative public voice of the U.S. forest products industry.
The rebuild's real test is what happens to the next new requirement: whether it slots into the architecture or gets bolted on. The type system and component model were designed so the answer stays 'slots in.'
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