Lessons from Running a 2,300-Page Government Jobs Portal on Laravel

Running a government jobs portal on the Laravel framework, HiSarkariResult maintains a database of 2,300 URLs. These URLs cover various aspects like job notifications, exam results, syllabuses, and admission notices. Despite its size, the site has some unique challenges, with content rapidly becoming stale. The same exam can progress from being a job posting, then an admit card, then an answer key, and finally a result.

Every page must direct users to official PDFs hosted on government websites. Here are some key learnings from managing this Laravel-based portal:

1. Model content around its lifecycle: Instead of creating separate tables for each section like jobs, results, admit_cards, and syllabi, it's more efficient to create a single posts table with a type column. The type column indicates the stage in the recruitment cycle. The fields shared by most records are title, slug, organisation, summary, important dates, official links, and so on.

All that varies is the stage in the recruitment cycle. A PHP-backed enum is used to manage the allowed types. This data organization allows for easy linking between related content, providing users with more relevant information rather than a generic 'latest posts' widget.

2. Enforce content type through routes: To ensure the correct content type is associated with a URL, the route should be set up to only resolve result posts if the URL prefix is /results/{slug}. If the prefix isn't correct, the job post can be inadvertently reached under /results/... resulting in duplicate or misfiled URLs. By using a helper function, this consistency is maintained across all routes.