Official portal for the Ukrainian Cosmetics & Perfumery Association — APCU. Members are manufacturers, importers, distributors. The portal had to handle three audiences without three sites: industry news, regulatory updates, and a public-facing membership directory.
The first instinct was to skip WordPress and build it on Symfony. Wrong instinct. The non-technical editorial team is a single person, working evenings. WordPress with a tight custom theme means she ships on her schedule, not ours. Eight years later, the editorial cadence still works without a developer in the loop.
EU cosmetic regulations change quarterly. The portal tracks notification labelling, INCI updates, ingredient bans, and the Ukrainian equivalents. Originally a flat CMS; we added a structured "regulation" content type with sort-by-effective-date and a per-document changelog. Boring. Critical.
Live since 2018. Still on the same custom theme. Multiple ownership transitions on the association side — the portal kept publishing through all of them. The strongest signal an agency build worked is that it still works after the agency closed.
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