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MODX website migration: the Lyon School of Medicinal Plants
Website migration: the case of the Lyon School of Medicinal Plants and Natural Knowledge
The Lyon School of Medicinal Plants was founded in 1983 by Patrice de Bonneval, a herbalist in Lyon for forty years, to enable everyone to gain an understanding of medicinal plants and their uses.
A strategic choice: MODX
In 2010, the school commissioned Enzo Graftieaux, a developer specialising in open-source software, to build its website. Unfazed by passing trends, he suggested the MODX content management system rather than WordPress or Joomla.
A mobile-friendly website
A few years later, the website was optimised for mobile phones and tablets thanks to a redesign by Véronique Vilmant: MODX’s flexibility allowed the content to be adapted without having to rewrite the entire site. A few features were added over time, again without any major upheaval.
In 2018, Enzo Graftieaux, who had managed the website since its inception, decided to take his professional career in a new direction and turn his passion into his livelihood: he now creates sculptures from recycled metals.
For the past few months, a recurring cache management issue had been causing blank pages to appear. It was making life a nightmare for the teams, yet no one could pinpoint the source of the problem, as nothing fundamental had changed.
AmaZili’s involvement: hosting and maintenance
On 12 June 2018, we met with the school to discuss taking over the management and hosting of its website. We quickly agreed on a contract for the hosting and maintenance of their MODX website, and we transferred the management of their domain names, as well as the website itself – initially on a trial basis – to our servers.
This marked the start of our investigation into the caching issue: after a week’s work by our MODX development and server administration teams, a solution was found. The page code was corrected, and the website relaunched on our new servers.
At the same time, our operations teams implemented the performance optimisations that benefit all our clients’ websites. On 23 July 2018, the website was up and running.
“We entrusted AmaZili with the maintenance and hosting of our website. Very shortly after taking over, AmaZili had already resolved a major recurring bug on our website and significantly improved browsing speed. A very good start!” Françoise Pillet, Director of the Lyon School of Medicinal Plants
Does your website need a new hosting provider?
Whether your current provider is changing business focus or your site is deteriorating for no apparent reason, we can take over existing sites, whether they’re built on MODX or not. See our pages on website repair and maintenance, hosting, and – if you need to change your address without losing your search engine rankings – redesign and migration.