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Software Architect & Full-Stack Developer | Greek Community of Alexandria (2026)

Executive Summary

Led the programmatic modernization of the primary digital portal for the Greek Community of Alexandria (EKA). Refactored a legacy monolithic portal burdened by third-party page builders (BeTheme, WPBakery, LayerSlider) into a lightweight Full Site Editing (FSE) block theme, achieving visual parity without manual content re-entry.

1. Context & Problem

  • ->Client / Domain: Greek Community of Alexandria / EKA (Community Organization)
  • ->Timeline: 2026
  • ->Project Role: Software Architect & Full-Stack Developer

//The Challenge

The legacy portal suffered from high server response times (TTFB) and database bloat caused by nested visual page-builder shortcodes across 15 years of archives. The platform required a modern PHP 8.2 runtime upgrade, bidirectional (RTL/LTR) multilingual layout support (Greek, English, Arabic), and preservation of historical publication records without manual data re-entry.

2. Technical Stack & Architecture

  • ->Runtime & Framework: PHP 8.2, custom FSE block theme components, and native Gutenberg Block API.
  • ->Data Layer: MySQL 8.0 with normalized tri-lingual schema mapping via Polylang.
  • ->Infrastructure: Nginx reverse proxy streaming production media assets to local and staging environments.
  • ->Testing & Validation: Playwright automated end-to-end visual regression suite and AST shortcode parser.

3. Architectural Decisions & Engineering Challenges

  • ->Programmatic Shortcode AST Parsing: Built a script-driven migration pipeline utilizing an AST parser (@wordpress/block-serialization-default-parser) to transform proprietary nested shortcodes into native core blocks, eliminating third-party rendering engines.
  • ->Multilingual Template Routing & RTL Engine: Implemented locale-explicit block template files (header-ar, front-page-el, header-en) to handle typography and alignment rules cleanly across Greek, English, and Arabic without brittle runtime PHP filters.
  • ->Historical Newsletter Date Parsing: Extracted 15 years of legacy publications from unformatted HTML and transformed unstructured Greek date strings (such as "Μάρτιος 2026") into standardized MySQL DATETIME records using a custom regex transformer.
  • ->Zero-Downtime Media Virtualization: Configured Nginx reverse proxy rules to stream 60GB of production media assets on demand during local and staging development, reducing staging disk storage requirements and sync setup times.

4. Operational & Institutional Impact

  • ->Visual Parity: Maintained 1:1 visual layout fidelity verified through automated Playwright visual regression DOM diffs.
  • ->Performance Gain: Completely removed third-party page-builder overhead, cutting memory allocation per request and improving page load speeds.
  • ->Automated Data Migration: Migrated historical archives and multilingual relationships without manual content re-entry.