RMTU · 2025
A new website that didn’t cost the union its history.
Twenty years of the Rail and Maritime Transport Union’s publications were stuck in a legacy site. The rebuild carried every one of them across intact.
A rebuild usually means leaving the archive behind
The Rail and Maritime Transport Union represents New Zealand’s rail and maritime workers. Its old website held 20 years of publications: the running record of two decades of union work.
The site needed replacing, and that is the point where archives usually die. Moving that much content by hand is expensive enough that most rebuilds keep the last year or two, drop the rest, and call it done. For a union, that history matters too much to lose.
What I built
A new website for the union, and a custom scraper that read the old site page by page and carried the full archive across to it, cleaned up and intact.
- The full archive, intact
- All twenty years of publications made it onto the new site. Nothing was trimmed, sampled, or quietly dropped to make the migration easier.
- A scraper that read the old site
- A custom scraper walked every page of the legacy site and pulled the content out, so nobody had to copy two decades of articles across by hand.
- Cleaned up on the way through
- Years of inconsistent legacy markup came out the other side as clean, consistent pages, with titles and dates where they belong.
- A site the union runs itself
- Publishing a new article does not need a developer. The team adds content themselves, and the archive keeps growing where members can find it.
The result
The new site is live at rmtunion.org.nz with the full archive behind it. A rebuild that usually costs an organisation its back catalogue didn’t cost this one a single publication.
- 20 years of publications stuck in a legacy site
- The full archive, live on the new site
- A migration that meant retyping every page
- A custom scraper carried it across
- Inconsistent markup and broken formatting
- Clean, consistent, readable pages
- History one rebuild away from being lost
- Preserved in full, and still growing
Replacing a site with years of content on it?
You don’t have to lose the archive to get a new site. I can tell you what bringing yours across would involve.