Schools receive a large stream of disconnected offerings for cultural, scientific, and sustainability education. Providers experience the mirror image: they struggle to get their offers in front of schools in a focused, organised way. This portal brings both sides together: a central place where schools can find, compare, book, and evaluate offerings.
When I joined, there was already a substantial Silverstripe 3.x system. My task was to take over from the previous application developer and, together with the client, actually keep evolving the project. The first step was getting clarity on what was there: which features were being used, which assumptions no longer held, and where the real pain points lived.
Based on that we drew up a roadmap together. Key choices included: centralising CMS management across all subsites, consolidating a few subsites that in practice looked too similar, routing evaluations between schools and providers in a targeted way, and applying a brand-new visual design as a sharp layer on top of the existing front-end — so we didn't have to rebuild everything to make the site attractive again.
Centralizing the CMS turned out to be the biggest lever. Previously, changes were scattered and required multiple steps; afterwards the client could roll out changes from a single place. That reduced errors, sped up editorial work, and gave a much better overview of what was live where.
Evaluations are an underrated piece. A good evaluation of an attended activity is a treasure for providers and a reliable signal for other schools. By routing evaluations cleanly and linking them to the right offering, the portal became not just a booking place but a feedback loop for the entire market.
By embracing the existing Silverstripe base and strategically extending it instead of trying to replace everything, the client could keep delivering to schools without long downtime or feature freezes. The project showed me again how valuable it is to take an existing codebase seriously and improve it deliberately.
Outcomes
- CMS management across all subsites centralised into one place
- Evaluations routed deliberately between schools and providers
- A new visual design on top of the existing Silverstripe 3 front end, without a rebuild