A national film-funding body running its public calls on a generic, insecure WordPress site — slow, breaking registrations, and a developer needed for every new form.
- Generic template, no brand identity
- Registrations kept breaking inside WordPress
- Slow load speed
- Hours lost to manual administration
- A developer needed for every new form or call
- No automation anywhere in the flow
- Frequent hacking attempts on the old CMS
We built a custom Laravel 11 application on a dedicated subdomain, fully decoupled from the institutional site. The architecture served three requirements: structured data, provable security and zero operational drag. Category-specific forms modeled from official documentation, a Filament admin panel, email OTP two-factor authentication, and a complete audit trail replaced the entire inbox workflow.
Manual email triage per call cycle dropped to zero, replaced by structured database submissions. Eight-plus grant categories went live, each with its own form and document schema. Three scoped role layers separate applicants, administrators and commission reviewers. 100 percent audit coverage logs every authentication event and admin action, permanently queryable inside the Filament panel.
A Laravel 11 backend handling routing, auth, file handling, queues and notifications, paired with a Filament v3 admin panel on Livewire and Alpine. MariaDB stores submissions and the audit log, PDF uploads are MIME-validated at ten megabytes, and email OTP secures access. Hosted on a VPS behind Cloudflare with a hardened header stack.
