Documenting the rich history and cultural heritage of Angkor

Angkor Database is an online resource on the 12^th century Angkor Wat temples, the ancient Khmer civilisation, and its capital city Angkor. Launched in 2016, it is a CSR project by MAADS and Templation Angkor Resort. It brings together books, publications, films, photographs, maps, and over nine hundred author profiles, documenting the rich history of Angkor under free and open access, with no ads.

Miranj adopted this project in February 2023 (originally built by our teammate Paul Manem). We started by moving the website into our resilient hosting infrastructure, adding full-page caching and a sitemap, and improving the SEO metadata along the way. We also upgraded the platform in stages, from Craft 2 to the latest version of Craft CMS.

Since then, we have continued to improve the website’s features and user experience. We added new sections to help readers explore the material, including an Authors index, a Maps collection that can be filtered by location and time period, and a Glossary whose terms are linked automatically wherever they appear. Search now highlights matched keywords in the results and on the pages they lead to. Photos now include a zoomable lightbox with linked credits, and books now include multi-level tables of contents. Behind the scenes, we refined the authoring experience with clearer field labels and instructions, better-organised entry sources, and a page builder for key narrative pages, such as the Homepage and About pages.

Angkor Database is widely used and appreciated by academics, researchers, students, and history enthusiasts worldwide. We are proud to be supporting this growing resource that preserves Cambodia’s rich history and cultural heritage.