The North Wales Social Care and Well-being Improvement Collaborative (let’s call it NWSCWIC for the sake of my fingers) is a fabulous new agency to support the implementation of the Social Services and Well-being Act (Wales) 2014. Naturally, they needed a website, and we were delighted to create one to meet their needs.
The Collaborative currently consists of 9 main project groups. They needed to provide content for both the public, and have private areas for professional members of each group to be able to download relevant documents such as meeting agendas, minutes and reports.
The site also needed to be fully bilingual and available in both English and Welsh.
The site was built using the [bl id=”589″]Genesis framework[/bl]. I’ve loved Genesis ever since switching to it a few years ago. It’s rock solid, dependable, and very flexible with none of the ridiculous bloat that comes with many free WordPress themes.
One of the projects has produced several videos to present the main findings from their report in a more accessible format. These are presented beautifully on the site using [bl id=”2769″]Envira Gallery[/bl], which allows you to embed YouTube videos in attractive, configurable galleries and then have them play in a lightbox. It’s a lot more impressive than simply embedding a series of YouTube videos on a page.
Making everything bilingual.
Just like when I’m out working in the garden, there’s a lot to be said for picking the right tool for the right job. Building websites that function well is no different, and for all language issues, my main weapon of choice is always [bl id=”663″]WPML[/bl]. Find out more about why I think WPML is the best solution to build a bilingual site in WordPress.
Custom content, and locking it down.
Each of the project groups needed its own section of the site; a page that would pull together various posts only intended for a private audience of relevant group members. Editors would also need to be able to create posts within each group, and add file downloads, all of which was to be inaccessible to users who were not logged in. The membership of each group changes dynamically, as people join and later leave, so they also needed a way to manage group membership from the front end.
To achieve this, Toolset’s [bl id=”1314″]Types plugin[/bl] was used to create the custom post types for the group content, with the partner plugin [bl id=”1314″]Views[/bl] being used to define the content templates and filtering involved on generating and styling the output. Toolset’s [bl id=”1314″]Access plugin[/bl] was then used to create the necessary custom user fields and to create the conditional statements to control who could see what. Access also provided the tools to build the various pages concerned with logging in, and resetting lost passwords etc.
Finally, again from the Toolset suite, the [bl id=”1314″]CRED plugin[/bl] was used to create the front end forms that allow the site Editors to add new users, and to manage the group membership for users.
The site has proved to be very popular in its first few months, attracting over 3000 visitors and nearly 15,000 page views. It wasn’t long before the compliments started to come in.
I’d like to take the opportunity of congratulating you on the website – very clear, succinct and easy to navigate.
Paul Apreda, Families Need Fathers
Creating the site is only part of the picture though, and we provide ongoing support for the various teams of people who will administer the site.
Whether you need a site with complex functionality like this, or something more straightforward, we can help.