Mit Vergnügen

Mit Vergnügen is one of Germanys biggest online magazines for local city focused culture, available in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne. From 2012 to 2018 I helped them as a freelancer to transform a simple WordPress blog to a powerful editorial platform and managed to relaunch the whole site twice in this time.

While the backend is still a WordPress site (which the client wanted to keep desperately), the frontend is a powerful Laravel application which interacts with the WP database directly. To achieve this, I contributed to several open source projects and created my own package to map the horrible formatted WP data to something that's actually fun to work with. The power of Laravel allows very granular caching and cache invalidation, asynchronous tasks and many more things that were not possible or highly difficult in plain WordPress, making the whole site a performant beast.

One key challenge was the interactive map, that shows curated places to eat, drink, shop, dance, etc. It's written in Vue.js with the powerful Leaflet.js mapping library underneath. The map is also part of a lot of content elements that allows the editorial team to show their favorite running routes or e.g. list the 11 best burger places in town.

A lot of love to detail went into several aspects of the site, including the main dropdown menu. Which is fairly complex piece, written in Vue.js and inspired by this breakdown of amazons mega menu.