Society for Academic Primary Care

Overview

This project moved the organisation from an ageing, end-of-life Drupal 7 platform to a modern, high-performance Drupal 10 membership and publishing ecosystem.

What began as a critical re-platforming project has matured into a multi-year partnership covering platform architecture, custom feature development, editorial tooling, e-commerce, membership lifecycle automation, and ongoing SEO and performance work.

This case study covers how I delivered a bespoke, accessible design system, a deeply customised membership engine, a modern editorial environment, and a reliable digital home for one of the UK's most active academic communities.

A Complete Rebuild for a Modern Academic Community

The original Society for Academic Primary Care site was built on Drupal 7 and had reached a critical crossroads. With years of accumulated content, legacy data structures, and an outdated editorial experience, the site no longer matched how the organisation worked. Furthermore, Drupal 7 was approaching its end of life, making a complete rebuild essential.

My priority was to redesign the platform around three core principles: maintainability, longevity, and editor autonomy. SAPC relies on a small administrative team to publish high volumes of conference, research, and membership content, and they needed to do this without constant developer intervention.

Instead of a simple visual refresh, I architected a completely new Drupal 10 foundation. Content types, categories, and field structures were modernised and consolidated. Crucially, I engineered a complex data migration to carefully port thousands of legacy records—including complex user data, historical content, and academic publications—into the new, future-proof system.

Complex Commerce & Membership Data Migration

The most technically demanding aspect of this rebuild was the e-commerce and membership system. SAPC had years of historical transaction and membership data tied to legacy Drupal 7 commerce modules.

I wrote custom migration scripts to seamlessly translate this historical data into a modern Drupal 10 licensing framework. This ensured that no active memberships were lost in the transition and that members retained full access to their accounts and purchase histories on the new site.

Today, this rebuilt membership engine powers several automated, hands-off processes for the SAPC team:

• Automated Rolling Renewals: When a member renews early, the system automatically extends their license based on their prior expiration date, ensuring they never lose remaining time.

• Smart Event Registration: The system seamlessly connects anonymous conference and workshop sign-ups to existing user accounts via email lookup, removing a massive amount of manual administrative work after an event. It also supports complex "register another delegate" flows, mirroring how academic events are actually booked.

• Automated Reminders: A background system dispatches renewal reminder emails at configurable intervals, allowing the SAPC team to manage memberships entirely hands-off.

A Custom, Lightning-Fast Design System

To replace the legacy front-end, I designed and built a fully custom, highly responsive theme from scratch. Using modern front-end development tools, I ensured the site remains incredibly fast and looks sharp across all devices.

The theme was built with a single, authoritative source of truth for visual styling. It handles the practical details that editors care about automatically: automatically resizing embedded videos to ensure they never break mobile layouts, formatting tables for smaller screens, and highlighting clear "Join SAPC" calls to action.

An Editor-First Publishing Experience

A major focus of the rebuild was giving SAPC's editors a modern, drag-and-drop authoring experience without locking them into rigid page templates. I implemented a block-based visual editor (Gutenberg) so the back-end editing screen perfectly matches what the public sees on the front end.

I built a suite of custom layout blocks specifically tailored to SAPC's brand guidelines, alongside an integrated icon library that lets authors search and place visual assets without needing to know any code.

The result is a tightly curated editing environment: editors get plenty of expressive freedom to build dynamic pages, but the system is carefully constrained to ensure every page stays strictly on-brand and mathematically perfectly aligned.

Smart Integrations for Day-to-Day Efficiency

Several custom features were developed specifically to make day-to-day operations smoother for the SAPC team:

• Academic Identifiers: Developed a system to generate stable, DOI-style academic URLs for their publications, ensuring long-term link integrity for researchers citing SAPC's work.

• Intelligent Routing: Automated link management ensures that if an editor links to internal content, the link is always kept up-to-date and SEO-friendly.

• Event Duplication: Built custom cloning tools that allow the SAPC team to duplicate complex conference registration setups, saving them hours of manual data entry every time a new event is announced.

• Streamlined Checkout: Custom post-purchase redirects intelligently route users back to specific campaign or conference pages after they buy a ticket or renew a membership.

Ongoing Technical Partnership and Impact

The relationship with SAPC has not stopped at launch. As a freelance partner, I provide continuous, enterprise-grade support: running core software updates, applying security patches, tuning performance, refining SEO strategies, and improving accessibility as the organisation's needs evolve.

Throughout this time, the site has reliably supported SAPC's busiest periods. During their annual conference season, registration traffic, abstract submissions, and bursary applications all peak simultaneously—handled effortlessly by the new infrastructure without operational incidents.

Impact

The SAPC rebuild was more than a software upgrade. It gave a busy academic society a modern, editor-friendly digital home that runs reliably with very low operational overhead. The automated renewal logic has saved the membership team countless hours of manual administration, and the block-based editor has drastically cut the time it takes to publish new research.

If you are running a membership organisation, a learned society, or any platform where a small team needs to manage a great deal of content and revenue without a large engineering department, I can help you build a platform that works for you.