Project Overview
Capital Metropolitan Planning Organization (Capital MPO) is a public-sector transportation platform designed to streamline regional planning, report distribution, and community engagement.
Technical Highlights
- Maintainability & Code Quality
Business Challenge
- Operational bottleneck in managing high-volume regional planning documents.
- Limited public discoverability of critical transportation data and meeting materials.
- Escalating maintenance efforts due to a fragmented content management approach.
System Constraints
- Accessibility Mandate: Under federal public-sector guidelines, all digital materials must be fully screen-reader accessible and support keyboard-only navigation.
- Large PDF Ingestion: Document uploads can exceed 100MB per file, requiring optimized server-side processing and storage management to prevent memory exhaustion.
- Long-term Archiving: The system must maintain historical records dating back 20 years, necessitating efficient document metadata indexing.
System Architecture
- Content Engine: Structured content custom schemas in WordPress coupled with an Apache web server.
- Search and Indexing: Optimized MySQL full-text search indexing on document metadata.
- Asset Storage: Decoupled asset serving configurations to prevent large PDF requests from locking PHP execution pools.
Technical Stack
Measurable Outcomes
- Document and resource management for public access.
- Structured content for plans, reports, and meetings.
- Accessibility-conscious, responsive layouts.
- SEO-friendly information architecture.
- Improved public access to regional planning information
- Strengthened transparency and community engagement
- Streamlined content updates for internal staff
Lessons & Insights
- Offloading large asset delivery to dedicated storage/CDN paths is crucial to protect server response times for normal web requests.
- Public-sector transparency requirements demand robust document categorizations that are decoupled from individual page URL routes.