DCCMA.com Relaunch
The Public Information Committee and DC CMA Intergroup are pleased to relaunch our website today on a brand-new platform. The whole site has been carefully rebuilt for a better experience, and we think you'll love it. While the design may feel familiar, everything behind the scenes has been built from the ground up to meet the unique needs of our fellowship. Powered by Trusted Servants Pro, our new site is ready to serve us well into the future.
So why change?
This has been a question I've grappled with for a few years. Our previous site was built on WordPress with several foundational plugins, and while it worked, the tradeoffs of staying on that platform were becoming hard to ignore. Performance was the biggest one — page loads and responsiveness routinely stretched into multiple seconds with no clear cause.
Another concern was plugin bloat and subscription sprawl. WordPress is wonderfully extendable through plugins, but the tradeoff is more complexity, a larger attack surface, and updates that can quietly break the site (as has happened more times than I care to admit). On top of that, our Trusted Servants Portal lived as its own separate WordPress install, duplicating a lot of functionality and making both sites more cumbersome to maintain. Handing all of that complexity off to future Public Information chairs would be a real burden.
Finally, the ongoing subscription costs for our plugins — alongside the climbing price of managed hosting — pushed me to rethink our digital strategy and start looking for alternatives.
Unification under Trusted Servants Pro
Rather than spin up another WordPress install and rebuild everything from scratch, I decided to create a complete platform built specifically for recovery fellowship websites: Trusted Servants Pro (read more about that here. TS Pro unifies dccma.com and the Trusted Servants Portal into a single application — one source of truth, one codebase to maintain, covering both the public website and our backend portal.
Running in a Docker container on a lean Ubuntu 24.04 droplet at DigitalOcean, TS Pro is feature-complete, secure, and quick — page response times stay under 500 ms across both the public site and the admin portal, while hosting costs 66% less than our old managed Cloudways plan. With no ongoing plugin subscriptions, monthly costs stay low and maintenance overhead is minimal: the container auto-updates whenever a new release is published.
A new meetings list — and richer meeting pages
We've rethought the meetings list with intuitive sidebar filters and an instant-search bar that surfaces the meeting you're looking for as you type. Meeting detail pages now surface every document and script attached to a meeting, with per-file control over what's public; non-public files are still visible to logged-in trusted servants on the backend. Add-to-Calendar buttons appear on every meeting too — one tap drops the schedule straight into your phone's calendar.
Announcements and events, reimagined
Our announcements and events pages got a full UI refresh, with several tabbed views — GSR Summary, Events calendar, and Timeline — alongside the standard card layout. A dedicated GSR button now lives in the header utility bar for one-click access to the GSR Summary. On mobile, the utility bar is swipeable left and right to reveal the rest of its controls.
Hyperlist and Printlist
Our accessibility-first meeting index — Hyperlist — has been refactored to better serve visitors with visual impairments: bright white text on a near-black background, generous typography, optimally placed controls, and a /-key shortcut that jumps straight into search.
Printlist* was tightened to squeeze every meeting and its key details onto just two sheets of paper. Download it as a PDF or print the page directly — both render identically.
Live search everywhere and Darkmode
Live search now reaches into every section of the site. Hit ⌘K (or Ctrl+K), or click the magnifying glass in the utility bar, and an overlay pops open with instant results as you type.
The whole site was built with dark/light mode as a first-class concern from day one. Every colour is driven by design tokens that swap automatically when dark mode is on — easier reading at night, and a more comfortable experience for anyone who simply prefers a darker interface. Even the dynamic hero on the homepage and the various background gradients respect the theme.
Future forward
Bringing dccma.com and the Trusted Servants Portal together has been a colossal task. With a platform purpose-built for the needs of a recovery fellowship — and the ability to build out new features on top of it — dccma.com is in a fantastic position for the years ahead.
As always, we value your feedback. Join us in carrying our message to the addict who still suffers — drop a line to [email protected] with suggestions, comments, or complaints.
In service,
Jason M.