MSC Fisheries app: a certification platform on Kotti CMS
Background
MSC's certification process for a fishery is years long, document-heavy, and involves auditors, fishery clients, stakeholders and the public. The data model is unlike a typical CMS: each fishery has version history, audit reports, surveillance reports, objections, public comment periods, and a status that moves through clearly-defined stages.
The main MSC public site is the right tool for marketing, news and standards documentation. It was the wrong tool for managing the certification dataset itself. A separate application was the right answer.
Solution
The Fisheries App is built on Kotti, an open-source Python CMS, as a custom database-backed application that publishes structured fishery records to the public while supporting the back-office workflow MSC's certification team needs. It integrates with the broader MSC content ecosystem — auditors and other publication pipelines — while keeping the certification-specific data model in its own home.
Since the initial 2016 build, the app has been continuously evolved: a substantial 2021 face-lift to modernise the editor experience and front-end presentation, and a 2025 platform migration to AWS App Runner to give MSC a modern container-based hosting profile with simpler scaling and lower idle cost.
Why this is a separate case study
MSC has two distinct relationships with PretaGov: the main marine-stewardship-council.org public site, and the Fisheries App. They share a client, but the technical and content patterns are different enough that they're documented separately. The pattern repeats elsewhere in our practice — when a client has both a public site and a custom application, we treat them as two distinct stories rather than collapsing them into one.
On the same client’s main platform, we also took over and stabilised the legacy CMS.
What this involved
A custom database-backed application on Kotti, an open-source Python CMS, rather than a CMS bent into the shape of a certification dataset
Models a years-long assessment lifecycle: version history, audit and surveillance reports, objections, public comment periods, and a status moving through defined stages
Publishes structured fishery records to the public while supporting the back-office workflow the certification team runs on
Deliberately separate from the main MSC website, which handles marketing, news and standards documentation