Overview

The Wedding Portal was created to provide a purpose-built digital platform for planning and managing our wedding, without relying on expensive commercial wedding-planning services.

The original motivation was simple: why pay ongoing subscription fees for a collection of services when I could build and operate the infrastructure myself?

Rather than outsourcing our wedding planning to a third-party platform, I set out to create an integrated solution that gave us control over our data, functionality and hosting, while providing the tools needed to manage the wedding from initial planning through to the big day.

The project became an opportunity to put my existing personal infrastructure to practical use, building something that solved a real problem while retaining long-term ownership.

The Problem

Commercial wedding-planning platforms often package basic functionality behind subscriptions, introduce limitations around data ownership and provide little flexibility to customise the experience.

I wanted to avoid paying for services we didn't need, while retaining the ability to manage guests, invitations, RSVPs and other wedding arrangements in one place.

More importantly, I wanted to own the underlying system rather than depend on a platform that could change its pricing, functionality or availability.

The Solution

I developed a custom wedding portal hosted on my own infrastructure, providing a dedicated public-facing wedding website alongside private planning and administration functionality.

The platform was designed around our actual requirements rather than the feature sets of commercial alternatives.

It was subsequently integrated into the broader Daly digital ecosystem, with Payload CMS providing the administrative environment and Cloudflare Workers handling application hosting.

Technical Architecture

  • Public website: wedding.daly.id.au
  • Administration: daly.id.au/admin
  • Hosting: Cloudflare Workers
  • CMS and administration: Payload CMS
  • Infrastructure: Integrated with the existing Daly digital platform
  • Data ownership: Privately managed application data and infrastructure

What It Demonstrates

The project demonstrates how existing personal infrastructure can be used to replace commercial software subscriptions with purpose-built applications.

It also illustrates a broader philosophy behind the Daly digital ecosystem: building and owning useful technology rather than continually paying for services that offer limited flexibility or control.

Outcome

A dedicated wedding-planning platform built around our requirements, integrated into infrastructure I already own and operate.

The project reduced reliance on commercial wedding-planning services while giving us greater control over the experience, data and underlying technology.

What started as a way to save money on wedding planning became another practical application within the broader Daly digital ecosystem.

The principle: If I can build something that works better for my requirements, retain ownership and avoid unnecessary recurring costs, why rent it?