Removing WordPress Bloat With a Move to Django

Who Are HN Law and what is the HN Hub?

HN Law specialises in financial services regulatory law. As part of their practice, they have also created and maintain the HN Hub. The HN Hub is a place for clients to keep up to date with regulatory updates, find resources around regulatory compliance, and receive training in subjects for compliance for the financial services industry. The HN Hub also offers template policies and procedures for use for people in the financial services industry.

Overall, the HN Hub is a central place for people in the financial services industry to find a variety of different resources that not only have to do with their compliance obligations, but also help them run their businesses on a day to day basis.

Increasing Reliability and Security

Before working with Red Crow Digital, the HN Hub was built on WordPress using a variety of plugins to keep it running. This setup was unreliable, slow, and generally bloated because, rather than have something built for purpose, the Hub was cobbled together.

Moving the HN Hub to a Django based foundation was an easy choice. Due to the size of the Hub, the speed offered by the Django framework ensured users could navigate it and find resources easily. We also installed Wagtail CMS to ensure that HN Law staff could easily add more content as well as maintain existing content.

Maintaining existing content was an important part of the new HN Hub. In the world of financial services law, things can change quickly, so it was important to HN Law that documents could be changed while allowing Hn Law staff version control capabilities. The version control logic, all handled through the Django framework, allows staff to modify and upload up to date versions of documents without having to add new documents to the system. It’s seamless and easy.

And of course, the whole new system has Django’s great inbuilt security.

Integrating Across Multiple Third Party Systems

Beyond having a great and functional new HN Hub, the team at HN Law also needed everything to integrate with a number of third party applications. As the Hub offered a number of live and pre-recorded webinars, it needed to integrate with both Zoom and Vimeo. The site also processes payments, so it needed to integrate with Payrix. Finally, HN Law wanted to manage their client database, so the new Hub needed to integrate with Hubspot.

Since we built the new Hub in Django, these integrations were easy without having to rely on the fiddly and often unreliable plugins used with the original WordPress based Hub. It also means that the integrations and the site itself are easily extendable and easy to maintain.

Expand Into The Future

While the new Hub is now launched and more functional than the previous Hub, we have plans for even more features in the future. Custom features that wouldn’t even be possible with WordPress. These new features include a dashboard for better understanding of user behaviour, easier document upload features, and enhanced security tools for the Hub.

Improving on HN Law’s Hub was a great project that allowed the team here at Red Crow Digital to create something exactly fit for purpose using Django. That’s what Django is good at. Django changes to allow the application to do what it should, rather than changing the application to fit the framework.

Red Crow Digital have had a very interesting and productive relationship so far with Holley Nethercote Law. We’re excited to see their Hub grow, and can’t wait to help add the next level of features to their brand new platform. We’re proud to present HN Hub - https://hnhub.com.au/