The Pastors Workshop

The Pastors Workshop had more than a decade of curated ministry content — sermon quotes, lectionary guides, liturgy, scripture references, blog posts — trapped inside a 3,000-page WordPress site. The platform served pastors with subscription-based access, but the CMS couldn't keep up. Adding new content types required developer work. Search was unreliable. The site had no way to gate content by subscription tier or manage group licenses for church staff teams.

Over 13,000 pieces of content — representing years of editorial work — lived in a WordPress database with no clean migration path. Each content type had its own metadata shape: scripture references embedded in body text, author relationships stored in custom fields, keyword taxonomies mapped to WordPress categories. Moving to a modern platform meant either losing that structure or building something that could extract and preserve it.

Rebar rebuilt the platform from the ground up on SvelteKit and Storyblok CMS, with Stripe handling subscriptions and Typesense powering full-text search across all content types. The hardest part was the migration: 13,000 content items across six distinct types, each with its own metadata shape.

We built a Node.js pipeline that connected directly to the WordPress MySQL database and processed each content type individually — extracting keywords from WordPress tags and categories, parsing scripture references out of body text with regex, mapping author relationships, stripping legacy shortcodes, and carrying over Yoast SEO descriptions. Every item landed in Storyblok with its structure intact, pushed via the Management API with zero data loss.

The new platform handles individual subscriptions and group licenses — church staff teams can share access under a single account. Pastors search across content types simultaneously: a single query surfaces matching quotes, lectionary entries, and liturgy together. Content editors add new types by creating a Storyblok component — no developer required.

The Pastors Workshop launched with its full content library intact — 13,000+ items, zero losses. Features that previously required custom WordPress plugins or developer involvement are now standard: group licensing, per-content-type access control, and real-time search across the entire library.

Content editors manage everything from the Storyblok dashboard. The search experience — backed by Typesense — lets pastors search across sermon illustrations, lectionary guides, liturgy, and scripture references in a single query, with filters by topic, author, and scripture reference. What was once a slow, unreliable WordPress search is now instant across 13,000+ items.