Manufacture Alabama approached us with an exciting concept: a statewide competition to showcase Alabama’s most innovative products, Manufacturing Madness, March Madness-style.
The challenge?
Create a robust, scalable voting platform that could handle potentially thousands of submissions with minimal manual intervention. This was the first year of the contest. And we had zero data to reference for potential product and company submissions. This needed to be lightweight, fluid, and scalable.
Technical Strategy
We crafted a sophisticated solution using our core development toolkit:
- WordPress as the primary platform
- Gravity Forms for submission management
- Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for flexible data handling
- Custom systems to prevent duplicate submissions
- Specialized voting solution for managing public votes and transitioning to smaller contests
Key Technical Considerations
Our development approach prioritized:
- Scalability to handle up to 5,000 potential submissions
- Multiple backup methods to prevent data loss
- Secure voting mechanism
- Performance optimization
Infrastructure Highlights
Leveraging our dedicated hosting infrastructure, we implemented:
- CloudFlare for content delivery
- Turnstile for bot protection
- Robust voting system designed to handle 10x expected traffic
