DATUM

DATUM is an Austrian magazine for long-form journalism. The site is built on the Roots stack — Bedrock, Sage and Acorn, which puts Laravel’s templating and container underneath WordPress — with a Bootstrap and Sass theme bundled by Vite.

The substantial piece of work was the paywall. Off-the-shelf plugins tend to bolt a checkout onto the side of the site and treat accessibility as someone else’s problem, so I built one:

• Metered access to individual articles and to complete magazine issues, with the same rules applied server-side rather than hidden behind CSS
• Mollie as the payment provider, with a checkout kept to as few steps as the payment flow allows
• Keyboard and screen-reader support throughout the purchase flow, not just on the article pages

The paywall’s job is to be uneventful — readers who pay should barely notice it, and readers who don’t should still get a page that works.