Overview

Foster Wales is a national collaboration of all 22 Local Authority fostering services in Wales. They required a robust and unified online platform that could represent a national initiative while allowing each local authority to manage their own localized content.

I helped develop a highly flexible WordPress theme, to maintain the Foster Wales brand and ensure visual and functional consistency while retaining independence for building out content and layouts across the different websites.

As the backend development lead, I built a bespoke editing experience using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and custom Gutenberg blocks to give content teams powerful flexibility without compromising design consistency.

Multilingual support was a crucial requirement for reaching both English and Welsh speakers. I extended the PolyLang plugin to dynamically generate multilingual options pages using ACF, and built logic to simplify content retrieval by abstracting language-specific slugs. A custom language switcher was also created to match the site's design language.

Additionally, I implemented a secure members area for foster carers and internal team members. This included a custom login flow, role-based permissions, and front-end gated access without exposing the WordPress admin area.

We also developed a block that integrates with the Google Maps and Places API to help users quickly locate and navigate to their local fostering authority.

What we did