This post is a guest contribution written by Rory Stobo from the Techfugees team.

We’re proud to announce our partnership with global hacktivist network, Techfugees, ahead of their second Global Summit in Paris.

Anyone casting even a brief glance at the news nowadays is likely to catch word of the escalating global refugee challenge. It's among the greatest social challenges of our time, and if you've ever wondered how you can help; you're not alone.

In response to the emergency, a band of tech industry experts came together to stage a series of non-profit conferences and hackathons. What started as a Facebook group became a worldwide network of over 18,000 members: Techfugees.

The Techfugees Global Summit

October 2018 sees the team at Techfugees host their

The jewel in the Summit’s crown is the finals of the Techfugees Global Challenges Competition

Join Techfugees on Twitter for live updates of this, and all their other great events as they happen.

ButterCMS and Techfugees

ButterCMS are partnering with Techfugees for the event, and doing our bit by hosting elements of the Summit site; speakers, partners, press, and the event program itself.

We’ve made it as easy and frictionless as possible for the team to manage their content using custom workspaces, which they’re finding particularly handy to handle their large line-up of speakers.

It’s a natural partnership, since we’re both all about finding elegantly simple ways to apply tech to problem-solving. Jamie Archer, who led the project on Techfugees’ end found that instead of throwing out all the hard work done by his predecessor and starting from scratch, ButterCMS let him simply add dynamic content features that his team could easily update. That reduced the workload of managing over 70 static HTML pages down to just a few, and freed his team to tweak pages themselves.

In Jamie’s own words:

“Custom content types and the workspaces are super useful because we can create very focused areas for people to work on. At the moment it's all in one workspace but I could imagine breaking up the site into different workspaces so that a team member could then be assigned a workspace for their area of the site. It's also ridiculously easy to create types, make changes and add content, including images.”

So… why not just use WordPress?

Despite being a seasoned WordPress developer himself, Jamie saw ButterCMS as the tool for the job. Inheriting a static site from the previous developer left him prone to temptation from what he sees as the three cardinal sins of WordPress: feature bloat, templating, and hosting.

He wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, he needed a streamlined means to revamp the site and incrementally add content and change layouts as the line-up grew. All of which needed to happen fast:

• Butter let him create only the content types and fields he needed, removing irrelevant features and fields that come with WordPress.
• Using VueJS to add interactivity to the current static HTML made the process faster. No need to port over the template to work in WordPress or create a new one.
• Hosting the site (written entirely in HTML, JS, and CSS) on Surge.sh made things a breeze. Changes can be published with one command, with rollback versions at the ready in case of any problems.
• Finally, Jamie anticipates serious traffic, and if the site ever goes viral, it’s all hosted on Surge's CDN so he’s confident the server can handle heavy loads.

Ready to see how ButterCMS can smooth out your web development? Try it for free today!