Case Study: Database of Religious History achieves streamlined expert contributions and 10x faster entry access with Pieoneers Software

Database of Religious History - Customer Case Study

Database of Religious History (DRH), an international team of scholars from UBC, Stanford and LSE, needed to build the world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history while overcoming scholar data overload, a clunky expert registration flow, complex nested questionnaires, slow entry pages and an outdated hosting setup. Pieoneers Software was engaged to provide product strategy, UX/UI design and web development along with technical architecture, workflow design, hosting & DevOps and optimization (implemented with Python, Django and React).

Pieoneers Software reworked the expert onboarding and built a client‑side, autosaving Questionnaire, a fast Browse tool with advanced filtering, a reader‑friendly Entry Detail view and a purpose‑built Editor Console, then modernized infrastructure with Docker, Ansible on AWS and GitLab CI/CD. The result: a streamlined registration workflow, dramatically improved questionnaire usability (10/10 experts reported improvement), published entries that are easier to find, an Entry view that loads more than 10× faster, and a production‑grade hosting pipeline—experts now sign up, complete and publish entries with little to no hand‑holding.

Database of Religious History

Edward Slingerland

Project Director