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Dbase

Our own WordPress foundation, behind most of the agency's websites

Dbase is the WordPress foundation I built for the agency's websites: a base theme and a library of modules that every new site could start from. It started because ready-made themes gave too little control over what we needed to build.

  • Reuse instead of starting over. Sliders, video players, charts and extended text formatting are ready-made modules. New needs became new modules, so the system grew without changing its foundation.
  • From sketch to site faster. Design from Figma or InDesign became finished modules, styled to each client's look. That gave a shorter path to a finished site and the same quality across projects.
  • Built once, then translated. On multilingual sites each page is built once and then translated, instead of being built again for every language.
  • Grown together with InPublix. Dbase and InPublix share parts, such as login and permissions, settings and the charts.
  • One base for the whole team. A shared foundation that was easy to maintain, with the pages put together in Visual Composer or Elementor.

Most of the agency's web projects from this period are built on Dbase.

Technical

Architecture & capabilities

Architecture principles

  • A self-built base theme plus a library of custom modules, with pages composed on top in Visual Composer or Elementor
  • Modules extend the system without changing its foundation
  • Styling driven by SCSS variables, so a design from Figma or InDesign maps onto the same modules for each client

Capabilities

  • Custom modules: sliders, video players, extended editor formatting and dynamic Highcharts charts
  • Custom login and permission handling, where standard WordPress falls short
  • Settings managed through the WordPress Customizer
  • Multilingual sites with WPML and its built-in translation editor, so each page is built once in one language and then translated

Shared with InPublix

  • The login and permission handling, the Customizer settings and the Highcharts chart code are shared between Dbase and InPublix