Oriire started in 2018 on Wix, it was initially for idea validation. It panned out, so we moved to Webflow where the platform grew up. Articles, authors and content types lived in the CMS with real structure and the site was reaching over 1 million impressions a month at its peak.
By 2025 though, we urgently needed to move from Webflow. They were emailing every month to say it had somehow exceeded bandwidth and the platform could no longer keep up with what we were trying to do.
At the time, the editorial pipeline ran from a Webflow form into Zapier, then into Notion, then into manual emails, back to Zapier and then manual publishing in Webflow. Every handoff was dropping something and complaints were getting more frequent. We were also incorporating a membership tier which meant stitching together a bunch of tools that added cost and another point of failure. The situation was untenable and moving became necessary.
The new Oriire is built on Next.js with Typescript and deployed on Cloudflare workers. It has a supabase backend that handles authentication, the database and storage while media is served from Cloudflare R2. This simplifies the process a lot. Contributors submit through an editor with rich text, image uploads and metadata tagging and the work moves through our editorial dashboard in a single pipeline that covers review, revision requests, editorial notes, acceptance, payment and publication. Published pieces connect into a structured archive that links related entries, cultural figures and authors across the platform, and memberships, payments and contributor pay are all in one place.
Roles were the tricky part here. Oriire serves different people with different needs. We have six roles including visitor, member, contributor, author, editor and admin and each sees something a little different. A visitor gets the public archive, a member gets gated content and a dashboard, a contributor can submit work and follow its status through the pipeline and read feedback inside the platform, an author gets a public profile linked to their published work, an editor sees the full submission queue and can review, request revisions, log payments and publish, and an admin sees everything. This involved HOURS of QA. But we got there eventually.
Payments were their own ball of yarn. Oriire has several membership tiers at different access levels, with Paystack handling payments across Nigeria and other African markets and Ko-fi covering international supporters where Paystack is not yet available. Contributors are paid for accepted work and an editor needs to log the payment, attach a receipt and update the submission status so that the contributor's record reflects it.
Plenty broke along the way. First, transforming images on demand at scale is expensive, so we stopped doing it, and images are now compressed and resized into three variants (full, card and thumbnail) at the moment of upload, before the file ever reaches storage. Everything serves from Cloudflare R2, which has no egress fee. Second, moving the old content without breaking it was a feat. When we moved to R2 there were over 800 images from the Webflow era sitting in a separate bucket with a different URL structure, and those URLs were embedded inside the HTML of article bodies, written directly into the content over years. We could either fix them by hand, which was not realistic at that volume, or write migration scripts that could handle files, database records and inline body content in one pass, so we wrote the scripts.
Where we are
Six years in, Oriire holds 244 articles, 18 Codex entries and 43 podcast episodes, written and researched by 84 contributors across 80 countries. I look forward to where the journey takes us from here.