Restorative Engagement Forum

The Restorative Engagement Forum is a training organisation that won the Howard League Award for Restorative Approaches in 2016. They’d been running on a WordPress site that had gone stale. Outdated, slow to update, and not reflecting the work they’re doing now.

What they needed

A complete rebuild. The old WordPress site had accumulated years of plugins, theme patches, and content that nobody was maintaining. The organisation runs training courses at different levels, works across multiple sectors, publishes case studies and testimonials, and has a team page and news section. All of that needed to be manageable without calling a developer.

They also had downloadable resources for practitioners, training course listings with dates and pricing, and sector-specific case studies. Not a brochure site. A proper content platform.

What I built

The site runs on Astro 5 with Keystatic as the CMS. Keystatic is git-based, meaning content lives in the repo as structured files rather than in an external database. The client gets a visual admin interface at /keystatic where they can manage everything. No external CMS subscription, no database to maintain.

I set up 7 content collections: team members, services, training courses, case studies, testimonials, news posts, and downloadable resources. Each has its own schema with the fields that actually matter for that content type. Training courses have RJC levels, durations, and pricing. Case studies have sector tags and testimonial fields. Resources have file uploads.

The old WordPress content was migrated across. I wrote a Python script to extract what was usable from the WordPress database and restructured it into the new format.

The CMS angle

This is the most content-heavy CMS setup I’ve built. The organisation has someone who logs in regularly to add training dates, publish news, update team bios, and upload new resources. They don’t need to understand code or git. They open the admin panel, make their changes, and the site updates.

Keystatic writes content as Markdoc files directly into the git repo. In production it syncs to GitHub. Every content change is version-controlled by default, which means nothing gets lost and everything can be rolled back. For a non-profit that doesn’t have IT staff, that safety net matters.

Where it landed

The site went live in early 2026 and the team has been managing content independently since launch. WordPress is gone. The site loads faster, the content structure makes sense, and the admin experience doesn’t require a manual.

Built solo, working directly with the organisation. If you’re a non-profit or training organisation stuck on an ageing WordPress site, get in touch.