Rescuing a 10-year-old bilingual WordPress multisite — rebuilt from a broken backup into a calm, readable, AI-assisted static archive.
Homepage hero — a reflective, armchair reading scene setting the tone for a calm biography archive
Memorial Archive is a bilingual biography site published by a Kerala-based charitable society. It ran on WordPress Multisite for a decade until an outdated theme and abandoned plugins left it broken beyond safe repair.
Every memorial lived on its own broken multisite instance, riddled with plugin conflicts. Re-installing WordPress on top of the old data risked losing bilingual content and years of family photographs.
Rather than patch a decade of breakage, content was recovered directly from the database, matched back to original photographs, and rebuilt as a clean, dependency-free static site.
“Preserving lives, honouring legacies” — a quiet, illustrated hero explaining that every story is prepared with the written consent of the family.
Queried the surviving database directly for raw page content across every subdomain, bypassing the broken theme and plugin layer entirely — then used AI to map the repeating bilingual structure and cross-match recovered text back to the original photographs.
A calm palette suited to long-form reading, with a first-class dark mode toggle — since most visitors arrive from a shared link to read one specific life story.
Rebuilt the recovered content as a dependency-free static site, removing the plugin fragility that caused the original failure, and launched at memorialarchive.org.
A clean grid of portraits — click any to read that person's full bilingual life story — each captioned with a short line describing who they were.
Every memorial follows the same shape, so a reader always knows where they are in a life story.
A short English and Malayalam introduction summarising who the person was and what they are remembered for.
The full life story — birth, education, public life and legacy — under clear subheadings with archival photographs inline.
A closing personal remembrance, often in Malayalam, capturing the family's own voice.
See Positive's charitable registration, editorial process and the written-consent standard behind every published biography.
Almost every decision on this site was about removing something rather than adding it.
No ads, no promotional banners, no urgency-driven CTAs — navigation stays minimal so attention stays on the biography.
English and Malayalam live within the same section rather than as separate pages, so a reader never loses their place switching language.
Archival photographs sit directly beside the passages they illustrate, rather than in a detached gallery.
Named Chief Editor, Associate Editors and Editors with portraits — grounding the archive's credibility in a real, accountable team.
A dedicated page supporting readers through the bilingual, section-based layout of each memorial.
A clear path for families to reach the editorial board with a new life story, or with feedback on a published one.
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