GURT Resource Center is the leading national center for societal information and expertise. Since 1995 it has been putting all efforts to improve and strengthen Ukrainian civil society.
GURT exists for conscious and successful Ukraine, where civil society ensures dignity, confidence, and trust among citizens at local and national levels. GURT is an important part of the development of communication, knowledge and resource platforms for socially active citizens from all regions of Ukraine.
From the technical point of view, gurt.org.ua web portal is a highly-loaded Django / Mysql MVC-based website that represents a complex logic of multiple interconnected components — articles, blogs, forums etc.
At the first phase of cooperation, we were responsible for maintenance of the existing infrastructure round the clock and implementation of the new functions. Our engineers were available, monitoring the site health, while our developers and QA were working on implementing new features.
The portal server was running an outdated version of Ubuntu, Django, MySql and different libraries. This was limiting the scope of the the available features we could introduce. With that, it was decided to fully update the server software, which can be considered as the phase two of the project.
We have created a clone server for the gurt.org.ua portal to polish the update process and to ensure the smooth migration to the new platform when going live. Since the number of the elements previously used on the portal server are no longer supported by current platforms, there was a big amount of coding done to make sure everything works properly.
In addition, there were multiple bug fixes applied to the original code of the site. Also, we have configured the automated database backup procedure, configured SSL certificates to make sure that the site is working with secure connection via https protocol.
After all the changes were successfully tested on the cloned environment, our team has rolled out the major upgrade to the production site and passed all the controls to GURT administrators with upkeep instructions and hardware update recommendations.
Now Gurt.org.ua portal performance is stable with no outages, being regularly backed up and is using the secure connection for its operation. Any changes to the current site can be made without a risk of portal crashing. New features that were not available before modernization can be added to expand portal’s functionality.
