The new website of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) is online. Behind its refreshed interface, Wikafi developed a WordPress platform connecting institutional information, documentary resources and member services. Its customisation goes well beyond visual design.
The CCBE represents bars and law societies across Europe. Its website needs to serve different purposes: informing the public, distributing publications, supporting committee work and providing services for members. The rebuild therefore required us to consider content, its relationships and the rules governing access as parts of the same project.
Document search designed for a specialised collection
A publication may cover several topics, relate to a committee or country and offer files in different languages. To help users navigate this material, we developed a search combining keywords, dates, categories, topics, members and document languages.
The search takes access rights into account: results, filters and downloads must remain consistent with each user’s permissions. Committee and country pages also present publications in their own context. Much of the complexity lies in these relationships between content, as well as in the filters visible on screen.
The new CCBE website’s public document search, with its filters and publications.
A members’ area reflecting the CCBE’s organisation
Members are more than a list of accounts. They belong to delegations, hold different roles and participate in committees. We adapted profiles and their relationships to represent this structure.
The members-only directory supports searching, filtering and sorting by several criteria, viewing individual profiles and exporting results to Excel. The information displayed follows profile visibility rules. This work connects people, their roles and the information relevant to their participation in the network.
Event registration with its own business rules
Event management also required specific development. Registration needs to account for participants, accompanying guests, selected options, availability and the pricing rules defined for each event.
Prices for the main programme and its options can change during defined periods. Quantities and selections must remain consistent through to the order and payment. We connected these requirements to the registration journey and WooCommerce’s functions, with a presentation adapted for English and French.
Migrating the history and preserving its relationships
Moving from the former TYPO3 environment to WordPress involved more than transferring pages. Publications, files, profiles and their relationships needed to be migrated while retaining the distinction between public content and restricted resources.
The migration required mappings between the old data and the new structure, classification checks and redirects for former addresses. This work helps preserve a usable history within the new website.
Customisation that also supports administration
WordPress and Elementor provide the project’s editorial foundation. We extended them with CCBE-specific modules and interfaces for document search, the directory, registration rules, linked content and multilingual features.
The aim is to provide tools suited to the organisation’s operations while keeping content manageable. Where possible, custom development is kept separate from WordPress and third-party plugin files to make maintenance easier. Updates still require checks on functionality and access rights.
Custom development starts with understanding how people work
This project illustrates our approach to complex websites: understand the users, clarify business rules, structure the data and make the interface work as a coherent whole. Design, content and development are considered together.
If you need to evolve an institutional website, a members’ area or a tool supporting your operations, we can help define the functions that matter and how to integrate them into a maintainable solution.
Explore the project and our services: