SIA Publishing and Play

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.


Plugins


Recent changes

21.176.0

Anonymizing a member by their sign-in ID no longer misses accounts that were already anonymized [*]

Release date: 05.08.2026

Fixes

  • Ariel 14.30.1 :: The anonymization tool no longer misses accounts that were already anonymized
  • Project Voting 13.5.1 :: The anonymization command now reports when an account was already anonymized
  • Deploy script now reads the release version from the changelog instead of guessing it from the last tag, so the two can no longer drift apart

21.175.5

Anonymizing a member now clears their social login profile and account together [*]

When someone’s personal information needs to be removed, their sign-in details with services such as Facebook and their account on the platform previously had to be cleared through separate tools, and only worked once their email address was already known. This is now handled in a single step, which can be started with either an email address or the identifier from the sign-in service.

Before anything is changed, the tool shows exactly what will be updated and asks for confirmation.

Release date: 05.08.2026

New

  • Ariel 14.30.0 :: Anonymizing a member now clears their social login profile and account together

Improvements

  • Project Voting 13.5.0 :: The Facebook anonymization tool now also clears the matching WordPress account

21.175.4

Mailing list options for the subscription form now stay accurate automatically [*]

The mailing list selector used when setting up a newsletter sign-up section on a page had a fixed set of choices that could fall out of date as available mailing lists changed. It now reads its options directly from the same source the rest of the mailing list system already uses, so new lists appear automatically and outdated ones are removed.

Release date: 29.07.2026

New

  • Publishing 21.46.0 :: New custom ACF field type keeps the mailing list selector in sync with Mailjet

Fixes

  • Design System 2.85.0 :: Render Venture matches as a list in the Profile and Venture full-page templates

21.175.3

CTA lead generator no longer stays hidden when its block condition fails [*]

Release date: 29.07.2026

Fixes

  • Publishing 21.45.1 :: CTA lead generator no longer stays hidden when its block condition fails

21.175.2

Facebook login no longer asks for an email address it isn’t allowed to use [*]

An earlier fix stopped the Facebook login screen from asking users to share their email, but the code behind the scenes was still quietly requesting that email address from Facebook after login. That mismatch could get the login feature flagged again, so the request has now been closed as well.

Release date: 28.07.2026

Fixes

  • WordPress Social Login :: Stop requesting the email field from the Facebook Graph API in Hybrid_Providers_Facebook::getUserProfile(), closing the gap left by the earlier scope-only fix

21.175.1

Slack members without a Play profile no longer repeat their first IT Infrastructure entry on every event [*]

Release date: 23.06.2026

Fixes

  • Ariel 14.29.2 :: Users with no Play profile no longer repeat their first IT Infrastructure entry on every event

21.175.0

Sitemap data commands renamed and import command added [*]

Release date: 23.06.2026

Improvements

  • Publishing 21.45.0 :: Sitemap data commands renamed and import command added

21.174.1

Sitemap data generator now includes the Summit and Retreat websites [*]

Release date: 23.06.2026

Improvements

  • Publishing 21.44.1 :: Sitemap data generator now includes the Summit and Retreat websites

21.174.0

Two new pages added to the Summit website [*]

The Summit website now has two additional pages in its inventory: one for SIA Summit Scholarships information aimed at alumni, and a thank-you page shown after a scholarship application is submitted. Both pages sit outside the main navigation.

Release date: 23.06.2026

New

  • Publishing 21.44.0 :: Two new pages added to the Summit website layout inventory

21.173.1

Bot workflow events no longer miss their first entry in the IT Infrastructure report [*]

Release date: 11.06.2026

Fixes

  • Ariel 14.29.1 :: Bot presence rows written by member activity no longer cause bot records to be skipped on first IT Infrastructure report entry


For the full history see the repository changelog.