Poets.org, produced by the Academy of American Poets, is a nonprofit organization that has been the premier digital resource for poems, biographies, essays, and other verse-related resources. Their site was built on a decoupled Drupal environment with an under-maintained, long-running codebase, largely siloed between the Drupal and Vue.js environments. They reached out to Chromatic to overhaul this platform and to address long-standing technical issues. The site had become unreliable and difficult to maintain, leading to high error rates, performance issues, and slow feature rollouts. The Poets team, overwhelmed with managing day-to-day glitches, needed a partner to stabilize their web operations and enable future growth.
Poets was grappling with a platform that, while beautifully engineered in its inception, had become outdated and unwieldy over time. As a nonprofit with limited budget and team resources, the organization could not afford an in-house technical team to manage this decoupled platform. Poets.org is the digital repository for poems, poets’ biographies, essays about poetry, and materials for K–12 teachers. Yet, the site was riddled with platform errors and bugs, a clear sign of its instability. Their limited staff was forced to spend valuable time constantly reacting to site errors and addressing technical glitches rather than focusing on strategic initiatives. The inability to reproduce errors or pinpoint the root causes made the situation even more frustrating. Poets needed a simpler and more stable infrastructure.
Chromatic focused on addressing both the technical and operational challenges at Poets by consolidating the competing codebases into a single GitHub repository and worked with our friends at Platform.sh to unify Poets.org’s front and back-end platforms. It was clear that this site was over-engineered for the needs of the organization, and what they needed was a more stable and maintainable platform. The core goals were to reduce error rates, speed up development, and help the Poets team shift from firefighting mode to strategic planning.
The new unified codebase creates an environment where any developer can step in and immediately make changes or push updates without threatening performance or stability. While launching the new platform took time, detangling the previous codebases made future revisions and updates considerably easier to manage.
Poets’ technical lead, frequently expressed his gratitude for Chromatic’s assistance in helping him think through problems and understand their solutions. He appreciated the stability and predictability that Chromatic brought to the platform, which saved him "a ton of time" allowing him to move out of reactive mode and focus on long-term strategic development.
Chromatic’s partnership with Poets showcases our ability to tackle complex, legacy systems, and transform them into reliable, manageable platforms. By consolidating the competing codebases and unifying front and back-end platforms Chromatic reduced errors, speed up development, and improved overall site stability. As an organization that's dependent on personal donations and grant funding, the Poets team is often nimble and creative with fluctuations in budgets and staff. Chromatic's work also gave the nimble Poets team a stable, manageable platform that empowered them to refocus efforts on their core mission and strategic initiatives.