Hoffentlich schmeckt's

The project

“Hoffentlich schmeckt's” is the weekly cooking podcast by Katharina te Uhle and Jörg Thadeusz. Every episode comes with recipes to cook at home, guests bringing their own dishes, and regular live shows. We built the platform that holds all of it together: a public website on the outside, an editorial system on the inside.

Starting point

The site previously ran on WordPress. As the number of episodes, recipes and guests grew, that installation reached its limits. Pages loaded sluggishly, images went over the wire uncompressed, and the links between episode, recipe and guest had to be maintained by hand. On top of that came the commercial sides of a production, sponsorships and affiliate links, which have to stay traceable.

Migration

All existing content was carried over in full: episodes, recipes, guests and the entire image archive. The URL structures that had grown over the years were kept, so existing links, shared recipes and bookmarks still work. Where an address did have to change, a redirect takes over; those are a built-in part of the new system.

Before the move we analysed which pages perform well organically and which search terms bring people to them. Those pages were migrated so that address, headings and content stayed together. Losing visibility is the most common and most expensive mistake in a relaunch, and that is exactly what did not happen here.

Every image was optimised during the import and converted to modern formats, which alone accounted for a large share of the old loading time.

Solution and core features

A single data model connects episodes, recipes, guests, hosts and live events. The editorial team maintains everything through a Filament back office; the website derives the connections automatically.

• Podcast: episodes with transcripts, guest references and a dedicated playlist feed for players. The show can be played directly on the site or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, radio.de and Acast.
• Recipes: ingredients, preparation steps, categories, FAQs and ratings, plus a search that still finds the right thing when the spelling is off.
• Shopping list: a recipe's ingredients move into the Bring! shopping app in one click, quantities included.
• Cooking mode: a stripped-back view for actual cooking that shows only what matters. The ingredient list stays visible alongside, and whatever is already in the pot gets ticked off. The tick state is shared between the recipe page and cooking mode.
• Uninterrupted listening: once an episode is playing it keeps playing while you browse the site, or while you cook, in cooking mode, the very recipe that episode was about. The audio never cuts out. The old site could not do this.
• Social media: the show has its own Instagram account, alongside the channels of Katharina te Uhle and Jörg Thadeusz.
• Saved items: signed-in visitors can bookmark recipes and episodes and find them again in one place.
• Votes: the audience picks the recipe and the cake of the month.
• Newsletter and notifications: subscriptions can be chosen separately for new episodes, new recipes and upcoming live dates, so everyone only gets what they care about.
• Live events: dates together with the dishes cooked there, linked to the matching recipes.
• Monetisation: sponsorship packages per episode plus affiliate partners and products with traceable attribution.

Technical highlights

Laravel with Filament as the back office, Livewire and Alpine.js for the interactive parts, Tailwind on the front end. Search runs through Laravel Scout against Meilisearch: type “Schokoladenkuchn” and you still get the chocolate cake, because the search tolerates typos. Images are optimised automatically on upload, and recipes can be exported as PDF. The player survives every page change, because navigation happens without a full page load and the player block is kept in the document; the stream is never restarted. The editorial team maintains per-page meta data for search engines. Operations and deployment follow the devRocks standard with Docker and an automated pipeline.

Outcome

Compared with the old WordPress installation, pages now load many times faster. The team maintains episode, recipe, guest and date in one place, and the website builds the cross-references itself. New episodes go live without developer involvement, and the commercial side of the production lives in the same system instead of in spreadsheets next to it.

Quite apart from the technology: working with Katharina te Uhle was genuinely good fun. Short lines of communication, clear decisions, and a client who knows exactly what her audience needs.

The website was designed by Andrea Hart. We built it.