A bilingual Marathi and English website for a residents' association in Navi Mumbai, delivered as a custom WordPress theme. Upload it, press Activate, and the site builds itself: seven pages, the menu, fourteen programme records and the front-page setting, with nothing left to assemble by hand.
The Brief
The association had a presentation deck for its 2026–27 programme year, a printed membership registration form and an emblem. It had no website. Its members read Marathi first, so Marathi had to be the primary language, with English as a complete translation rather than an afterthought.
The committee also had to run the site themselves on ordinary shared hosting: change a contact number, edit a programme or review a membership application without calling a developer. And the paper registration form, which collects ID details and a family table, had to move online without losing a single section.
What We Built
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A theme that provisions the whole site Activation creates Home, About, Annual Programmes, Social Initiatives, Membership, Calendar and Contact, wires up the menu and permalinks, and seeds fourteen programme records: six annual programmes and eight year-round initiatives, each with its own page. Provisioning is versioned and matches records by key, so re-uploading an update never duplicates pages or overwrites the committee's edits.
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Two languages without a translation plugin The theme carries both languages itself. A header toggle switches the entire site and is remembered in a cookie, with Marathi as the default. Every Customizer setting and every programme has a Marathi and an English field, and a blank English field falls back to Marathi rather than rendering empty. The theme never letterspaces Devanagari, because tracking pulls the matras away from their consonants.
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The paper form, section for section The membership page reproduces the printed registration form: personal details, address and residence, education and income, ID documents, an eight-row family table, membership type, passport photo and declaration. Submissions are nonce-checked and honeypot-protected, photo uploads are limited to images under 5 MB, and a failed validation keeps everything already typed so a six-section form never has to be filled in twice.
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A members register in the admin Each registration lands under Members with an automatically assigned, sequential member number. The office-use block from the paper form (registration number, receipt number, fee and a pending, approved or rejected status) is completed by the committee, not the applicant, and one click exports the full register as CSV.
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Elementor on the theme's terms Elementor has no bilingual layer of its own, so the theme registers nine of its own widgets, including the programmes grid, member benefits, annual calendar and the registration form. Every free-text field is entered twice, once in Marathi and once in English, so pages built visually still answer the language toggle. The site is complete without Elementor and was tested on a clean WordPress install with no plugins active.
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A hero built to the approved redesign The association's emblem sits under a gold arc with its motto on a notched ribbon, over a graded landscape photograph and a card of the association's pillars. One reveal system animates the page, hides content only once the browser has proved it can bring it back, and switches off entirely under reduced-motion settings.
The Stack
A custom WordPress theme in PHP with a custom post type for programmes, a registrations post type with its own admin columns and CSV export, bilingual Customizer panels for the organisation's details, and vanilla JavaScript for motion. Headings are set in Tiro Devanagari Marathi and body text in Mukta. The emblem ships at several raster sizes, and the theme serves the smallest file that still covers the rendered size at 2x. Development ran in Docker with WP-CLI, while the deliverable is a single 1.2 MB theme zip for shared hosting behind LiteSpeed Cache. The hero photograph is Creative Commons licensed, and its attribution renders in the footer automatically.
The Outcome
Handed over as one theme zip with a step-by-step deployment guide: upload, activate, re-save permalinks, purge the cache, then add the contact details the source documents never contained. Registrations hold Aadhaar and voter ID numbers, so the hand-over notes also cover a strong admin password, keeping WordPress updated and switching on host backups. Future updates mean re-uploading the same zip, and the committee's content survives untouched.
Need something similar? Reach out — we build multilingual, self-managed sites for associations, trusts and community groups.