Community of Hearts

Community of Hearts is a not-for-profit, charitable organization in Guelph, Ontario supporting youth, adults and seniors with developmental exceptionalities to achieve the level of independence they desire. Staff register participants in learning programs throughout the week, and the organization needed a site that could handle all of that – from member profiles to program sign-ups to attendance reports. Unlike most of my portfolio work, I also designed this one.

The main challenge was something I hadn’t done before: building a membership and registration system. The tricky part is that there are two types of users. A participant can log in and register themselves for a program, but a caseworker needs to manage multiple participants and register them on their behalf. Both paths use the same form – the caseworker just gets a dropdown to pick which participant they’re registering. Switching participants live-updates every field across the form without a page reload, which was satisfying to get working.

Programs can be standalone events or recurring series, and the two behave quite differently. A series enrolment is ongoing – one sign-up covers all future sessions until the staff marks an end date. The attendance reports expand each enrolment out to individual sessions within whatever date range you’re looking at, which turned out to be a surprisingly involved piece of logic to get right.

The whole system is built on WordPress with Gravity Forms, The Events Calendar, and Ultimate Member – but all the actual business logic lives in a custom MU-plugin that treats those three as infrastructure. The theme just handles presentation. That separation was a deliberate choice and one I’m glad I made early, because the registration system ended up being far more complex than I initially expected.