Website Audit, Upgrade & Redesign for Ballet Institution
- UX/UI Design Web Development
- $200,000 to $999,999
- Dec. 2020 - Mar. 2024
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"They did not tell us what we wanted to hear. They told us what we needed to know."
- Arts, entertainment & music
- Warsaw, Poland
- 1,001-5,000 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
FNX Group - TYPO3 agency conducted a technical audit of a TYPO3 platform for an opera and ballet institution. The team also upgraded the platform, rebuilt the frontend, and integrated a ticketing system.
FNX Group - TYPO3 agency delivered a fully responsive platform, reducing operational complexity and content governance overhead. The team led a transparent process, building a quality of mutual trust. FNX Group - TYPO3 agency's technical depth was evident in every architectural decision they made.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am the Digital Marketing Chief Specialist of Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera is Poland's largest and most prestigious opera and ballet institution, presenting world-class performances to hundreds of thousands of audience members each year and serving as a guardian of Polish an European opera and ballet heritage.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire FNX Group - TYPO3 agency to accomplish?
- Conduct a deep technical audit of our TYPO3 installation and infrastructure
- Modernise the platform – addressing a critical stack of accumulated problems: outdated TYPO3 v7 running on end-of-life PHP, core source files overwritten by previous developers blocking any normal upgrade path, critical backend modules built in Zend Framework outside of TYPO3 entirely, two competing templating systems, and a mobile version built as a separate parallel site rather than responsive design. The work involved upgrading TYPO3, rebuilding the frontend with full mobile responsiveness, re-engineering all Zend Framework modules as native TYPO3 extensions, and migrating all content to the new architecture
- Rebuild our Archive website (archiwum.teatrwielki.pl) and consolidate it into a unified TYPO3 multisite instance alongside the main site
- Establish ongoing technical support and maintenance under a long-term SLA agreement covering TYPO3 upkeep, security, performance monitoring, and third-party integrations
SOLUTION
How did you find FNX Group - TYPO3 agency?
We issued a call for proposals for a TYPO3 platform audit.
Why did you select FNX Group - TYPO3 agency over others?
- Pricing fit our budget
- Good value for cost
- Company values aligned
- Deep platform knowledge backed by TYPO3 certified developers.
How many teammates from FNX Group - TYPO3 agency were assigned to this project?
6-10 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
The project evolved from the initial TYPO3 audit into a full platform transformation, delivered in phases over more than three years across multiple procurement cycles. To understand what was at stake: for an institution like Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera, the website is not just a marketing tool – it is the virtual foyer where audiences, artists, and partners meet. It covers the full breadth of the Polish National Opera’s activity – repertoire and event calendar, artist profiles, archive of performances, educational materials, news, the Polish National Ballet section, the Theatre Museum, the Moniuszko Competition, the VOD platform, and the ticket sales integration with iKSORIS. At the time of the project, the platform held over 1,000 pages, 24,000 content records, 12,000 people records, 35,000 performance records, 15,000 archived media items, and 3,000 news entries – a digital institution in its own right, accumulating years of cultural heritage content that could not be lost or corrupted in the process. The core deliverables were:
TYPO3 platform audit. FNX delivered a comprehensive technical audit of our existing TYPO3 installation. The report was deep, technically precise, and genuinely eye-opening — and what it revealed was worse than we had anticipated. It covered the full stack — CMS version and extension ecosystem, frontend architecture, backend templating systems, database structure, Zend Framework modules, mobile implementation, and server environment: TYPO3 v7 running on end-of-life PHP with core source files overwritten by previous developers, blocking any normal upgrade path; critical backend modules built entirely outside TYPO3 in Zend Framework connecting to undocumented external databases; two competing templating systems creating chaos for editors and developers; and a mobile experience built as a completely separate parallel website rather than responsive design. The audit concluded with a clear set of recommendations that became the direct brief for everything that followed. It was the document that turned a vague sense of unease into a concrete, actionable plan. With that document they exceeded our expectations for sure.
TYPO3 upgrade from version 7 to version 10 LTS. The platform had been running on a version out of active support since 2017 and out of security support since late 2018 - a serious vulnerability for a high-traffic public institution handling ticket sales through the integrated iKSORIS system. As the audit had revealed, a standard upgrade was not possible: previous developers had modified TYPO3 core source files directly, blocking any conventional upgrade path. FNX conducted a full extension-by-extension analysis, rebuilding or replacing every component that lacked a v10-compatible equivalent. The obsolete templavoila templating system was replaced entirely with a clean, maintainable modern architecture. Backend modules that had originally been built outside TYPO3 entirely in Zend Framework, were completely re-engineered as native TYPO3 extensions, eliminating the fragile and undocumentable hybrid architecture that had made the system so difficult to maintain and impossible to upgrade safely.
Ground-up responsive frontend rebuild. The original teatrwielki.pl had no responsive design whatsoever. The mobile experience was not a responsive version of the site – it was an entirely separate website, built as an independent page tree running in parallel with the desktop version. For the editorial team, this meant every piece of content had to be created, maintained, and updated twice. Navigation structures, news articles, event listings – all duplicated. When URLs were shared externally, opening them on a mobile device would redirect to a different address in the mobile tree, and if that page hadn't been separately created and maintained, the user landed on a 404 error. Entire sections visible on desktop – including the featured content and news sections on the homepage – simply didn't exist in the mobile version at all. It was not just a poor user experience. It was an editorial nightmare that doubled the workload of the content team on every single update, with no guarantee of consistency between what desktop and mobile users were seeing. FNX rebuilt the entire frontend from scratch using a mobile-first RWD approach – a single unified codebase that adapts seamlessly across all devices and screen sizes, eliminating the parallel-site architecture entirely.
Custom data migration. Moving content from the old platform to the new one was far more complex than a simple export and import. The entire underlying architecture was changing – the templating system was being replaced, the Zend modules were being decommissioned, and the database structures those systems had used were disappearing along with them. Years of content – event records, people profiles, programme information – had to be carefully extracted from structures that would no longer exist in the new system and re-imported into completely new ones. From my perspective as Product Owner, I understood the risk clearly: this was the kind of work where mistakes mean lost content, broken records, or data that arrives in the new system malformed and unusable. And the scale made any manual alternative unthinkable – we are talking about a website that had been accumulating content for years, covering hundreds of performances, productions, artists, and archive records. There was no realistic path that involved doing this by hand. FNX wrote custom scripts to handle the entire translation, and the result was clean. The migration was lossless. Every single record made it across intact.
Archive site rebuild. Our Archive website (archiwum.teatrwielki.pl) presented a separate but equally serious challenge. It had been running on Liferay – a Java-based enterprise CMS platform – entirely independently from our TYPO3 main site. The original architectural vision had been for the two systems to communicate automatically, with content from the main site flowing into the Archive seamlessly. That integration had never been successfully implemented. In practice, Archive content was being prepared manually and imported by hand – a time-consuming, error-prone process that was simply not sustainable at the scale of an institution like ours. By 2021 it was clear that Liferay itself was becoming an outdated platform with no clear future, and that the right path was to decommission it entirely and rebuild the Archive natively within TYPO3. FNX delivered exactly that – a fully integrated TYPO3 multisite Archive that shares the same instance as the main site, with proper content governance and none of the manual overhead of the Liferay era. Both properties went live simultaneously in March 2024.
iKSORIS ticketing system integration. Teatrwielki.pl serves as the public-facing layer over our iKSORIS reservation and ticketing system – a specialist platform used across more than 350 Polish cultural institutions. TYPO3 handles the entire audience journey from programme discovery through to the handoff into the ticket purchase flow, making the reliability and performance of the integration business-critical. FNX maintained and developed this integration throughout the engagement, coordinating where necessary with the ticketing system provider Softcom and our cloud infrastructure partner Oktawave.
Continuous SLA support. Running alongside all project phases, and continuing to this day, is a technical support agreement that FNX has maintained since December 2020. That ongoing support – covering TYPO3 core and extension maintenance, performance monitoring, third-party integrations, security patches, and accessibility compliance – has been as important to us as the project delivery itself. A cultural institution of our scale and public visibility cannot afford gaps in technical coverage, and that continuity across more than five years has been a defining feature of the partnership.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
The most fundamental outcome is the elimination of a platform that had been technically insolvent for years. Teatrwielki.pl is now fully responsive – the mobile experience went from a stripped-down, editorially burdensome parallel site to a complete, seamless version of the full platform, reflecting the reality of how our audience accesses us today. Our editorial team now manages the main site, the Archive, and our VOD platform from a single TYPO3 multisite backend, significantly reducing operational complexity and content governance overhead. The Archive migration was completed without data loss – every historical record is intact and accessible. The hybrid Zend/TYPO3 architecture that had made the system fragile, undocumentable, and impossible to upgrade safely has been fully resolved. The iKSORIS ticketing integration runs stably within the modernised environment, supporting the Theatre's primary revenue stream without interruption. The platform is now running on a significantly more stable, more secure, and better-maintained version of TYPO3 – with an active upgrade roadmap in place.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
We worked in Scrum, and FNX insisted from the outset that I be present as a genuine Product Owner – not a client approving things from a distance, but an active participant making decisions in real time, present at sprint reviews, with authority and accountability. I valued that insistence strongly. It reflects the way they approach projects: they want a real counterpart at the table because they know it produces better outcomes and faster decisions. We managed the work through Redmine, FNX's project management tool, which gave me full visibility into the backlog, progress, and any issues at any point in the project. That transparency, combined with the Scrum rhythm, built a quality of mutual trust that is genuinely rare in vendor relationships. Throughout the entire engagement I was completely confident – without reservation – that I could rely on them.
The project ran over more than three years, with planned pauses driven by our procurement and budget cycles – the unavoidable reality of working with a publicly funded institution. Within each active phase, delivery was on schedule and communication was consistent. We spoke weekly via Skype and MS Teams, and once a year we met in person – alternating between the Polish National Opera in Warsaw and the FNX office in Gdańsk. That rhythm worked well. Whenever we resumed after a procurement break, FNX picked up with complete context and continuity. There was never any sense of lost momentum or the need to rebuild shared understanding from scratch.
What was your primary form of communication with FNX Group - TYPO3 agency?
- In-Person Meeting
- Virtual Meeting
- Email or Messaging App
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
Their TYPO3 expertise is the real thing – backed by TYPO3 certified developers, not a marketing claim but a demonstrable technical depth that showed in every architectural decision they made throughout the project. The audit that started our relationship set the tone: it was thorough, honest, and precise in a way that gave us genuine confidence that we were dealing with people who truly knew what they were looking at. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear. They told us what we needed to know.
But what I will remember most from this collaboration is the quality of the working relationship they actively built. FNX pushed from the very beginning for me to be a genuine decision maker on the project – present, accountable, empowered. That insistence shaped the entire engagement. Because of it, we built a level of mutual trust that made even the harder stretches of a long, complex, multi-procurement project manageable. I always knew exactly where things stood. I knew that if something was wrong, they would tell me directly. I never had any reason to doubt they were doing their absolute best for us and for the Polish National Opera.
I came into this project as a marketer responsible for the Polish National Opera’s digital presence, not a software engineer. Working closely with the FNX team over these years, I learned an enormous amount – about TYPO3, about frontend and backend architecture, about backlog management, about what good agile project delivery actually looks like in practice. That was not something I expected from a vendor relationship, and it is something I am genuinely grateful for.
Are there any areas for improvement or something FNX Group - TYPO3 agency could have done differently?
Yes – and I say this with full awareness that it reflects a structural challenge inherent to public institution procurement as much as anything else. On a project of this scale, spanning thousands of hours and multiple formal tender cycles, we experienced situations where actual effort exceeded the original estimates. In a public institution, budgets are fixed well in advance – we receive an estimate, we run a public tender based on that estimate, the tender is awarded, and only then does work begin. When actual effort deviates from the estimate by even a modest percentage, it translates into a significant amount at this scale, and that creates real difficulty for both sides: for us, because our budget headroom is limited; for FNX, because the original estimate was made in good faith under genuine uncertainty.
With the benefit of hindsight – and I say this with a smile – I believe FNX should have built more buffer into their initial estimates. More conservative estimates would have made procurement planning and budget management smoother for everyone involved. It is genuinely the one area where I would ask for something different. Everything else – the technical quality, the communication, the commitment, the relationship – was exemplary.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
"Deep TYPO3 expertise that showed in every architectural decision. Complex migration across thousands of records – delivered without a single loss."
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"Delivered on schedule across multiple procurement phases spanning over three years. Always picked up with full context after each planned pause."
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"Competitive pricing for a public institution. Full platform modernisation, zero data loss, 5 years of SLA – value delivered far exceeded the cost."
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"FNX turned a platform in crisis into a modern, stable, responsive digital institution. Five years of trust, zero regrets. Unreservedly recommended.