Yarn and Chai - Django CMS and Site Redesign

Overview

Yarn and Chai was looking to seperate out their membership site from their main blog and pattern store in order to provide their All-Access pass members with a more streamlined experience. The new site would feature a custom membership portal for users to access exclusive content and resources and deals with payment processing through Stripe. The site uses RDS running PostgreSQL for the database and S3 for static file storage.

Project Goals

Less Cluttered User Experience: Create a new site that is less cluttered and easier to navigate for site members, without having to see adds or other content that is not relevant to them.

Streamlined Membership Portal: Create a custom membership portal for users to access exclusive content and resources that allows them to manage their account and subscription.

Simplified Payment Processing: Create a streamlined payment processing system that allows users to sign up for a membership and manage their subscription using Stripe.

Improved Site Performance: Improve site performance by seperating out the membership site from the main blog and pattern store onto Elastic Beanstalk, utilizing RDS for the database and S3 for static file storage.

Solution

Yarn and Chai’s main site is built on Wordpress, so we wanted to make sure that the membership site had similar user friendliness for the admins of the site. While Django is a bit less user friendly, we made sure to customize the admin site so that it had all that is needed to manage the site. We also made sure to use the Django admin site to manage the membership data migration from the old site to the new site.

Utilizing Elastic Beanstalk for the hosting of the site allowed us to easily deploy the site and manage the environment. We also used RDS for the database and S3 for static file storage. We used CodePipeline to manage the deployment of the site.

Challenges

Membership Data Migration: Probably the most sensitive and difficult process was making sure that the 4000+ members were able to log in on the new site with out having issues, like losing their access to the site that they paid for. The solution to this was to go slow and make sure we were exporting the data from the Wordpress site correctly, and then we wrote a custom python script as well as a custom upload form on the Django admin site that allowed us to upload efficiently and accurately. Then, all we had to do was anounce to the members that they needed to reset their password and they were good to go.

Integration with Main Site The big question was how is this going to interact and play nice within the ecosystem of Yarn and Chai. Selecting the subdomain members.yarndandchai.com was a good choice because it is easy to remember and it is clear that it is a seperate site from the main site. Other decisisons like how to handle the navigation bar and footer were also important to make sure that the site felt like it was part of the Yarn and Chai brand, but it also gave members a clear indication that they were on the membership site.

Summary

Project Reflections:
This project was a valuable opportunity to deepen my skills in AWS as well as Python and Django. I was able to learn a lot about how to manage a project with a large amount of data and how to make sure that the data migration process was smooth and accurate. It was an interesting project as well, with a lot of cool styles and challenges that I had not encountered before. I am very happy with the final product and I am excited to see how it helps Yarn and Chai grow their business.