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Why Axanar Needed One Domain

July 18, 20241 min read
Why Axanar needed one domain — three stacks, one donor brain. Video and still by Grok Imagine.
Three platforms, three logins, and fifteen thousand donor relationships scattered across Kickstarter, WordPress, and pilot portals — the case for unification.

Algorithm workflow

Fragmented stacks → one canonical domain

GoDaddy WordPressWooCommerce · ~$336K shopaxanardonors.comLovable + Supabase pilotCrowdfunding exportsKickstarter · Indiegogo · PayPalProblem: 3 logins · 15K+ profiles scatteredTarget: axanar.com — one domainDrupal Fly (truth) + Next.js Fly (public) · axanardonors → 301 /portalMid-2024 planning → 2025 pilot → unification series
Mid-2024–2025: WordPress commerce, Lovable donor pilot, and crowdfunding exports — converging on axanar.com with Drupal + Next.js on Fly.io.

I'm Lee Quessenberry — webmaster since 2015, and the engineer behind the rebuild you're reading on today. These dispatches run under my Engineer's Log moniker, Captain Q'Berry, because the work is operational: keeping the fleet's communications, commerce, and donor records aloft while production chases premiere.

When we started planning a modern axanar.com in mid-2024, the public site still lived on GoDaddy WordPress with WooCommerce. It had carried the project for a decade — roughly $336K in shop revenue — but donor data was never truly unified. Kickstarter and Indiegogo pledges, PayPal records, credit-card perks, and ad-hoc spreadsheets each told part of the story.

By 2025 we added a second front door: axanardonors.com on Lovable and Supabase so fans could log in before Episode 4 marketing. That pilot succeeded at launch and struggled at scale — another login, another bill, another place for profiles to drift.

The goal of this series is simple: explain why we chose Drupal decoupled + Next.js, what we built across two years, and how Axanar returns to one canonical domain with one donor brain behind it.

Series mission statement — Grok Imagine quote video.

What "one domain" means

  • axanar.com / beta.axanar.com — public site, shop, gallery, news, wiki, donor portal
  • cms.axanar.com — Drupal 11 on the 1984.hosting VPS: content, commerce, CRM, fulfillment, messages
  • Next.js on the same VPS — fast public rendering via GraphQL + ISR
  • media.axanar.com — film bytes on this disk (Caddy), not a rented object store
  • axanardonors.com — 301 to the portal; email DNS only after cutover

Next: the architecture blueprint we prototyped before the donor resurrection sprint.

Engineer's Log — Unification series (Part 1 of 8)

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Engineer's LogProduction UpdateAxanar Production NotesDonors & Fulfillment
Why Axanar Needed One Domain | Axanar Productions