Members' website with approvals, events and document sharing

The challenge

A UK digital agency needed a development partner for a new responsive website for a professional network of young people working in the rail industry. This was more than a brochure site. The network needed member registration with approval, a committee application process, a document area, videos, events with seat limits, an ambassador programme and a finance area for expenses, receipts and invoices. It also had to connect with the network's email marketing and file-sharing tools. The agency owned the client relationship, so the work had to be delivered behind their brand on their staging environment, in step with their review cycles.

What we did

• Membership features. We delivered the WordPress build for registration and approval, the committee flow, events, ambassadors, the finance area and documents, working from the agency's specification and its successive change lists. This included an ambassador request form added during the project.
• MailChimp auto-registration. We built a custom plugin that adds each newly registered member to the network's MailChimp list automatically, so the mailing list stays in step with the membership.
• Google Drive document plugin. We built a custom plugin that connects the site to a shared Google Drive and gives each user their own folder for documents, so files are stored in the network's existing workspace.
• Events and seats. We added a number-of-seats field to events, with spaces left shown to members, and worked through the event creation, preview and booking-page issues the agency raised.
• Pre-launch fix rounds. Through October and November 2017 we worked through the agency's issue lists, covering admin media loading, finance, FAQs, opportunities posting and a committee application error, until the agency signed off.

Tech stack

WordPress, PHP, MySQL, MailChimp API, Google Drive API