Twice a year, program owners log in to a public media organization’s royalty portal to claim what they’re owed.
The organization asked 3Pillar to update the WordPress site behind it, and while we did, we proposed rebuilding the portal as the next step.
Program owners claim their royalties through a portal a previous vendor left partly finished
Our client is a public media organization, and its stations air programs that other people own. Those owners, or the representatives who act for them, are paid royalties twice a year, and they claim them through the organization’s royalty portal. When the portal doesn’t work, owners can’t claim what they’re owed.
A data provider supplies the list of programs the stations aired, and that list is loaded into AWS. Owners then log in, confirm their share of each program and submit their claims, and the royalties are calculated from those claims.
The portal ran on WordPress, and the previous vendor that built it had left some of its functions about 75% finished, with none of the work documented. WordPress was also error-prone, so when an owner couldn’t log in or upload their information, they contacted the royalties administrator, who had to sign in herself to work out what had gone wrong and why.
We did the WordPress update first, and every update pulled five more systems along with it
The client asked us for about a month of work to update the portal’s old version of WordPress, and we did it.
On this stack, though, updating WordPress was never a matter of pressing one button. It also meant updating PHP, the plugins, the Linux image, the Python lambdas and the MySQL database. And because new WordPress versions arrive every one to three months, the same set of updates came due again and again.
While the update was underway, 3Pillar proposed rebuilding the portal with a new design and data model, so the client could leave the WordPress update chain behind.
Our account manager took the proposal to counterparts at the client. The client had heard a lot of complaints from owners about how the WordPress portal worked, so it chose the rebuild as the next phase of the work.
Four people, no documentation: how we rebuilt a royalty portal while its old version stayed live
The rebuild had to keep every function the old portal offered, so our team first had to understand each one. Alexandru Iordache, our delivery manager and business analyst on the engagement, met again and again with the client’s technical team and the royalties administrator. Together they traced how each piece of data moved, how each royalty was calculated and what the half-finished functions were meant to do.
The hardest part for me was that everything that was developed was not documented. Nothing.
Alexandru IordacheDelivery Manager and Business Analyst, 3Pillar
Four people did the work: a designer, an engineer, a tester and Alexandru. Alexandru estimates a rebuild like this would normally need three or four developers, on top of design, testing and delivery.
“We used only one, because we leveraged AI well,” he said.
That engineer was a back-end developer who built both the front end and the back end of the new portal using Claude Code and other AI tools. It’s the same shift Anthropic’s December 2025 study found among its own engineers and researchers using Claude: “Everyone is becoming more ‘full-stack’.”
React on Django replaced WordPress, so the portal no longer follows WordPress’s core and plugin release cycle. The new portal also has no content management system, because the client agreed that its wording would rarely change. Even on WordPress, the client sent text changes to the vendor as requests.
A wording change now goes out as a release in about two minutes.
We timed the rebuild for the months when few owners use the portal and kept the old version in production until the switch, so the cutover was low risk and no owner saw any disruption.
Next, we plan to bring reporting and royalty calculations inside the portal, so the administrator can run them herself
On the administrator’s side, a royalty cycle still runs the way it did before the rebuild. It depends on systems outside the portal, and she has to rely on colleagues in other teams to get it done.
A royalty cycle today, and what the next phase brings into the portal
| Step | Today | Next phase |
|---|---|---|
| Program list | Loaded directly in AWS | Uploaded inside the portal |
| Reporting | Run in a separate reporting tool with its own login | Run inside the portal |
| Calculations | Run as scripts by a colleague on another team, who reports the results back | Run by the administrator from the portal |
The aim of the next phase is for the royalties administrator to run most of a royalty cycle herself, from the portal. Small, AI-assisted teams are changing how many people a rebuild like this needs, and based on this project, we’re talking with the client about design patterns for its wider UI/UX.
“[Once the next phase is in place,] you will not have to rely on different [people] from different teams,” Alexandru said.
3Pillar is a platform-driven AI engineering company: 2,000+ consultants, engineers, and product leaders across North America, Latin America, Europe, and APAC, and 20 years of Product Mindset®. Our app modernization teams work on the systems organizations run every day. To talk about a system of your own, contact 3Pillar.
