Our Portfolio

What made it awkward

Those three jobs pull a WordPress install in different directions. Membership wants accounts, tiers and renewals. Events want dates, registration and a listing that does not go stale. The public pages want to be editable by staff who are not developers and should never have to open a template to change a paragraph. Off-the-shelf plugins cover any one of these well and the combination badly — the usual outcome is four plugins that each own part of the member record and disagree with each other about it.

What we built

• A membership layer where the member record is held in one place rather than split across plugins
• An events calendar with registration, run by chamber staff rather than by us
• Custom plugins for the behaviour the off-the-shelf options got wrong, so the rest of the stack stayed standard
• Editable page layouts in Elementor, so copy and structure changes do not need a developer

Stack

Where it stands

Live and in day-to-day use by the chamber's own staff, who run membership and the event calendar without coming back to us for routine changes.

What made it awkward

Selling a course is an ecommerce transaction with one awkward difference: what the customer buys is access, not a parcel. The checkout has to end in an enrolment. A general-purpose LMS plugin and a general-purpose store plugin will each solve their own half competently and leave a manual step in the middle — and that middle step is where enrolments get missed, usually at the exact moment a promotion doubles the order volume.

What we built

• WooCommerce as the commerce layer, with courses modelled as products so pricing, tax and discounts use machinery that already works
• Checkout completion wired through to enrolment, so paying for a course is what grants access to it
• A catalogue and course pages built in Elementor, editable by the team running the courses

Stack

Where it stands

Live, selling courses and enrolling learners through a single checkout with no manual step between payment and access.

What made it awkward

A marketplace has to hold two audiences with opposite interests in one system, and keep an order moving between them: quote, accept, assign, deliver, pay. None of that fits a content management system. Once payment, job state and two sets of accounts are in play, the honest answer is that this is an application with a website attached, and it needs to be built as one.

What we built

• A Laravel application owning the order lifecycle, accounts and permissions
• A Vue.js front end for the parts of the flow that need to respond without a page load
• Stripe for payment, so card handling stays with a provider whose job that is
• Redis alongside the database for caching and queued background work

Stack

Where it stands

Live and running the full order lifecycle — quoting, payment and delivery — for both sides of the marketplace.