We moved Code.org off a proprietary, engineer-only CMS onto a governed page builder—consolidating ~800 legacy pages and shifting content ownership to the teams who needed it.
Code.org's marketing site ran on "Pegasus," a proprietary CMS built in HAML. Only a handful of engineers could update pages, changes deployed on the product release schedule, and the site had ballooned to ~800 pages because even deprecation required engineering work.
The replacement couldn't be simple: it needed to serve countries with restricted internet access, support translation management, handle massive traffic surges, and pass extensive security and privacy reviews—all while giving teams with different access levels the autonomy to publish.
After testing tools like Webflow and Leadpages, we saw non-designers overwhelmed by open-ended editors. We stripped out spacing, layout, and color guesswork—variable-based tokens auto-switched every element in a section when editors changed its background.
We worked directly with Contentful’s PM to push their new Studio page builder to its limits. We built a React component library with content bindings and composed them into drag-and-drop section patterns for our most-used layouts.
Shared content updates from a single source of truth, reducing the need to republish. The model was scoped to scale beyond marketing into the product experience, with draft previews, scheduled publishing, and multi-page releases built on top.
We rebuilt the IA—cutting ~800 pages to fewer than 140—split DSCO into independent packages so the CMS could deploy without coupling to the product, used automated routing between old and new systems, and re-illustrated 250+ outdated visuals.
Engineering load dropped to maintenance-only. Dozens of editors across marketing, outreach, advocacy, and curriculum now publish independently. The rebuild delivered fully accessible pages, strong Lighthouse scores, and became the foundation for high-stakes launches—including spinning up an acquired subbrand's site in under a month and powering Hour of AI.
Work image 1 of 4: The governed page builder: layers, canvas, and a properties panel with content bindings.