10 November 2025 · 7 min read
The Southern India Chamber of Commerce and Industries (SICCI) came to us with what sounded like a website project. What emerged over two years of development was a content management platform, an event system with PDF generation, a press and media archive, and — eventually — a full multi-tenant microsite platform giving every member organisation their own web presence. Here's how it developed and what we learned.
SICCI's existing website was managed by sending content to a developer, waiting for it to be updated, and then checking whether it looked right. The secretariat — the administrative team that runs the chamber day-to-day — had no ability to update content themselves. Events were posted days after they happened because someone had to send the details to the developer, who then found time to update the site.
The core requirement was simple: give the secretariat tools to manage their own website, without needing a developer for routine updates. But as we worked through the discovery process, the scope clarified into something more structured.
A chamber of commerce has distinct content types, each with different management requirements:
We chose a Laravel modular monolith. Each content area — Events, Press, Gallery, Publications, Committees, Members — was built as a distinct module with its own controllers, models, and admin panel section. This means different members of the secretariat can be responsible for different modules without getting confused by features they don't use.
The admin panel is organised to match how the secretariat actually works. The events coordinator sees events management. The communications officer sees press and gallery. The membership team sees member records. Each person works in their area without the overhead of a complex CMS that tries to manage everything through a single editor interface.
Chamber members expect well-formatted event invitations and flyers they can share via WhatsApp and print for notice boards. A chamber event invitation isn't a simple email — it carries the chamber's letterhead, the correct logo placement, the event details in a specific format, the RSVP information, and the chamber's registration details at the footer.
Getting dynamic PDF generation right — consistently, across different event types, with correct fonts and logo rendering — took significant iteration. We went through three PDF generation approaches before settling on one that produced consistent output across different server environments. The challenge isn't generating a PDF; it's generating a PDF that looks exactly like the approved design, every time, regardless of whether the event name is four words or fourteen.
The effort was worth it. The secretariat now generates event invitations in seconds — previously this required a graphic designer to manually update an InDesign template for every event.
In 2025, SICCI launched a new member benefit: every member organisation gets their own website on the SICCI platform. Each member site runs on a subdomain — organisation.sicci.in — with its own home page, about section, events listing, committee memberships, reports archive, and strategic engagements section.
This is multi-tenant subdomain routing: a single Laravel application serving hundreds of distinct websites, each with their own content, each on their own subdomain, all managed through a central admin panel.
The technical challenge is that Laravel wasn't originally designed with this in mind. Retrofitting multi-tenancy into a working application — determining which tenant is being requested, loading the right content, isolating data correctly — is significantly more complex than designing for it from the start. We got it working, but it required restructuring parts of the application that had been built for single-tenant operation.
Two years after launch, here's what the secretariat actively uses day-to-day versus what was configured once and rarely touched:
High frequency (weekly or more):
Low frequency (monthly or less):
The pattern holds for most content-driven organisations: a small number of content types generate 80% of the activity. Building the high-frequency tools well matters most — the low-frequency tools can be more basic as long as they work reliably.
The microsites platform should have been planned from the start. When SICCI first came to us, the member microsite concept wasn't on the roadmap — it emerged as the platform matured and membership demand grew. By the time we built it, the main platform had two years of architecture decisions baked in, none of which had accounted for multi-tenancy.
If we were starting today, the data model and routing architecture would be designed for multi-tenancy from day one, even if the microsite feature itself wasn't launched for 18 months. The incremental cost of designing for multi-tenancy upfront is small. The cost of retrofitting it is large.
For any membership organisation — chamber of commerce, trade association, professional body — considering a digital platform: start by mapping what content your secretariat creates, how often, and who needs to see it. The right platform structure follows directly from that analysis. Don't start with technology choices.
