Engineering notes from ManTek: WordPress at scale, AWS for media, and publishing systems that stay calm when the story breaks.https://www.mantek.io/enhttps://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-email-ses/https://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-email-ses/WordPress sends mail through PHP's mail() by default, and the usual SMTP fix stores your credentials in wp_options. Here is how to send through Amazon SES with an IAM role, so there are no credentials to leak, and no silent failures to miss.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/syria-government-design-system/https://www.mantek.io/insights/syria-government-design-system/A field analysis of 14 national government design systems and what a modern RTL-first one takes, using Syria's new identity as the case study.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/youtube-deleted-our-channel/https://www.mantek.io/insights/youtube-deleted-our-channel/A platform can delete your channel in one action, and a newsroom's entire video archive with it. Here is the architecture that turned that into a one-click recovery: keep the original in S3, treat YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and your own infrastructure as interchangeable play sources, and make playback a setting rather than a hard-coded embed.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-s3-media-pipeline/https://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-s3-media-pipeline/On-the-fly image derivatives instead of twenty pre-generated sizes, browser-direct uploads for multi-gigabyte video, clean generated S3 keys, and two-tier storage. How the NUZ media pipeline keeps WordPress lean on S3 and CloudFront.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/newsroom-url-shortener-wordpress-aws/https://www.mantek.io/insights/newsroom-url-shortener-wordpress-aws/Long Arabic URLs collapse into unreadable garbage on social. Here is the branded short-link system we built on WordPress and AWS, with Bitly as a swappable front and our own edge as the hot standby, so shared links survive any vendor switch.Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-arabic-slug-truncation/https://www.mantek.io/insights/wordpress-arabic-slug-truncation/A routine WordPress update can silently truncate every long Arabic URL on your site. The root cause is in core, and the fix that survives every update.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/how-we-built-mantek-io/https://www.mantek.io/insights/how-we-built-mantek-io/The site you're reading runs on the edge for the price of its domain, static Astro on Cloudflare Pages, a git-based CMS, and a perfect Lighthouse score.Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.mantek.io/insights/breaking-news-wordpress-aws-architecture/https://www.mantek.io/insights/breaking-news-wordpress-aws-architecture/When a story breaks, traffic doesn't grow. It detonates. The architecture that carried a pan-Arab broadcaster through five years, outage-free.Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT