The Welsh Paediatric Society (WPS) was founded in 1973 to provide a political and social network for Welsh Paediatricians, to promote good practice and research, and just as importantly to provide friendship and goodwill.
The society provides paediatricians across Wales and neighbouring areas with the opportunity to share knowledge, undertake research and to provide the best possible paediatric and child health service.
It now has over 200 members from across Wales and beyond and hosts two annual clinical meetings:
- The WPS Spring Meeting is hosted by paediatricians in the north of the country in May.
- The WPS Autumn Meeting is hosted by paediatricians in the south of the country in November.
With the society’s current website built using software that was about to be obsolete, the society required an upgrade to ensure support, and to improve security.
In addition, the society required a refreshed web presence that was more responsive and usable, across all devices. They felt it was time to utilise automated functions, via the website, to reduce the administration of member registration and event booking.
Key objectives:
- a more flexible, mobile friendly site
- streamlined event booking function
- online membership management including registration, and tiered pricing
- easier reporting for site administrators
- automated event feedback
About the project
With the society’s current website built using software that was about to be obsolete, the society required an upgrade to ensure support, and to improve security.
In addition, the society required a refreshed web presence that was more responsive and usable, across all devices. They felt it was time to utilise automated functions, via
the website, to reduce the administration of member registration and event booking.
Workshops were used to clarify the workflows the team would ideally like the new site to manage, alongside those current elements that were to be carried across into the new website.
The new structure was built to automate membership management, including taking payments and renewals and allocating the correct membership level to individuals. This
replaced a cumbersome, paper-based system of recording memberships that was used previously.
In addition, event management was automated, so that bookings are made via the website. Additionally, an automated feedback system emails attendees to gain valuable
information that informs the creation of future events.
Outcome
The site has substantially reduced administration for the society. Memberships and payments are now entirely automated, with administrators able to extract reports as
necessary. In addition, events can be managed more easily. Being more easy to use, the website has attracted higher visitor numbers as a result.
Why Drupal was chosen
The previous website was built using Drupal 6 which was rapidly reaching end-of-life.
The WPS staff enjoyed the ease-of-use and content administration that Drupal provided and so were very happy to have a new website built using Drupal 7.
The structure of the previous website had not been well architected and so a decision was made early on in the planning process to build a new Drupal 7 based website from scratch.
Key reasons for choosing to use Drupal were:
- open source with an established community
- a strong commercial ecosystem
- a well planned roadmap for future development
- support for mobile devices and responsive design
- the ability to easily migrate users and selected content from the previous site
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Drupal 7 was chosen as the most stable version of Drupal core which also had the best support for contributed modules needed to provide the functionality required.
Theme and Display
The AdaptiveTheme theme was selected as the most suitable starting theme providing component-based CSS and a responsive, mobile-first grid design to build the WPS design with.
