Case file No. 03 · 2026

TryDota

Revive a Dota 2 fan site with an archive going back to 2011: move it off the old engine, keep the design and URLs, add three languages and an automated news feed.

R&D Media portal and communityGaming · RU, EN, UA trydota.com

Client: In‑house product
Our role: Archive migration, theme, 10 plugins, SEO, automation
Duration: September 2026
Stack: WordPress · PHP 8.3 · bbPress · Polylang · OpenAI

Context

Where they started

TryDota ran on DataLife Engine, with the forum on uCoz. The site had not been developed for a long time, and some of the content survived only in Web Archive.

We rebuilt the archive and moved the site to WordPress, keeping the look and the URLs that readers and search engines were used to.

Task

What had to happen

Keep the archive and the old page URLs
Bring back the community: forum, mini‑chat, profiles
Reach English‑speaking and Ukrainian audiences
Publish fresh news without the manual routine

Stack

What runs on what

Engine: WordPressPHP 8.3MySQL 8
Appearance: Custom themePHPCSSJavaScript
Community: bbPresscustom forum, chat and profile plugins
Languages: Polylangcustom i18n plugin
Content: OpenAI APIWP‑CronWP‑CLI
Server: nginxApacheCloudflare

Solution

What we did

An archive with nothing lost

We moved 1,165 articles, the forum and the file archive from DLE and uCoz, and restored what was missing from Web Archive. Old URLs such as /1180-roli-geroev-v-dota-2.html open as before.

A familiar design on a new engine

A custom theme reproduces the old site’s 2020–2022 template: a left‑hand menu, the dark‑and‑orange colour scheme, a sidebar with the mini‑chat and latest comments.

Community

A bbPress forum, mini‑chat, polls, guestbook, private messages, author profiles and article ratings.

Three languages

Russian with no URL prefix, English at /en/ and Ukrainian at /ua/ on Polylang, with hreflang and x‑default.

An automated feed

On a schedule, OpenAI turns Valve announcements, patches, tournament results and Reddit discussions into news posts. Images get a watermark automatically.