SIA Publishing and Play is the WordPress codebase powering the Social Impact Award network. It runs as a WordPress multisite — one installation hosting a central hub and a separate site for each country team — and is organized around two units.
Publishing covers the editorial and public-facing layer: articles, events, press mentions, resources, and project listings produced by country programme managers through a shared workflow. A layout engine and contact form system underpin the sites, and a glossary links recognized terms into content automatically.
Play is the network’s internal knowledge base — a restricted-access platform for team members and candidates, with layered access control based on community role, team membership, and organization status. It also serves as the home of member profiles, country teams, partner organizations, and the competition voting system.
Connecting everything is a suite of integration and infrastructure plugins that handle data synchronization with Airtable and the Application & Assessment Platform, Slack membership and activity tracking, environment management, user permissions, and performance caching across the network.
Front end. The sites are rendered entirely through an in-house design system built on Fractal, with Twig as the templating language and Gulp as the build tool. WordPress’s native template hierarchy is not used. Instead, Timber bridges WordPress and Twig, passing structured data contexts to design system components. The design system lives in a separate repository and is included here as a library.
Expand and normalise country maps [*]
Ten new countries added to the country maps component, all map assets regenerated to a consistent dot-grid format, and the generation process documented for future additions.
New
Congo DRC flag and map missing from country switcher [*]
Release date: 15.05.2026
Fixes
International website cache cleared when publishing a team site [*]
Release date: 15.05.2026
Fixes
Live save feedback on newsletter subscriptions [*]
Saving newsletter subscription changes on the profile edit page now shows a “Saving…” indicator while the request is in flight, followed by a confirmation or error message once it completes. The subscription status label under each newsletter also updates immediately after saving to reflect the new state, with a visual highlight on any list that changed.
Release date: 15.05.2026
Improvements
Subscription status shown on newsletter settings [*]
The newsletter subscription section on the profile edit page now shows the email address used for each subscription, or “not yet subscribed” when not enrolled. The two lists are now labelled “Spark” and “SIA Network Digest”, and each includes a short description of what the newsletter covers.
Release date: 15.05.2026
Improvements
Work email display fix on profile page [*]
Release date: 13.05.2026
Fixes
Mailjet unsubscribe webhook listener [*]
When a contact unsubscribes from the Spark or Network mailing list directly in Mailjet, the platform now notifies the site automatically and the local subscription record on their profile is updated to reflect the change. Previously this could only be reconciled manually via a CLI command.
Release date: 13.05.2026
New
Mailing list subscriptions now use work email addresses [*]
Profiles subscribed to the network mailing list are now contacted at their work email address where available, falling back to their SIA Passport address if no work email is recorded. The subscribed address is stored on the profile so there is a clear record of which email was used. The work email is also now included in profile data exports.
Release date: 13.05.2026
Improvements
Work email field and unified import command for profile email addresses [*]
A new work email field is now available on profiles, displayed in the contact section alongside the existing secondary email. The two separate email import commands have been merged into a single command that accepts the email type as a parameter.
Release date: 12.05.2026
New
Improvements
Scaling contact form recipient locked and deploy alias added [*]
The contact form used for scaling enquiries now routes submissions to a dedicated inbox rather than the site admin address. The WP-CLI command that applies these mail settings across all sites is now also available under a more descriptive name.
Release date: 12.05.2026
Improvements
For the full history see the repository changelog.