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.
Editors can now see how many times a Playbook article has been viewed [*]
Each article now shows the all-time view count and the name of the person who last updated it. This information is visible only to editors.
Release date: 28.04.2026
New
Slack Connect members can now be linked to their profiles via secondary email [*]
When a Slack Connect member’s first event arrives and their Slack email address does not match any profile directly, Play now checks secondary email addresses as a fallback. If a match is found this way, the event is sent to the IT Infrastructure report as a new record rather than an update.
Release date: 28.04.2026
Improvements
Organization logo no longer cleared after API-driven updates [*]
Release date: 28.04.2026
Fixes
Profiles can now store secondary email addresses [*]
Each person’s profile can now hold one or more secondary email addresses alongside their primary email. When the primary email is replaced, the previous address is automatically kept as a secondary. Secondary emails can be imported in bulk from a CSV file and are used as a fallback when searching for a profile by email address.
Release date: 28.04.2026
New
Slack Connect users now correctly identified in activity reports [*]
Release date: 27.04.2026
Fixes
Activity report now identifies who or what triggered each event [*]
Two new fields are now sent with every website network activity event. One identifies the category of actor — logged-in user, scheduled background task, WP-CLI command, or unknown process. The other carries the actor’s unique identifier, which is the WordPress user ID for logged-in users and the initiator label for system actors.
Release date: 27.04.2026
Improvements
Activity report now correctly captures post creation and uses UTC dates throughout [*]
Release date: 27.04.2026
Fixes
Restrict profile-to-list bulk subscription to active profiles in host organisations [*]
Release date: 24.04.2026
Fixes
Fix incorrect subscription status shown in the mailing list CLI tools [*]
Release date: 24.04.2026
Fixes
Mailing list subscription checkboxes added to the profile edit page [*]
Members can now subscribe or unsubscribe from the Spark and Network newsletters directly from their profile edit page. Each change is applied to Mailjet immediately. Subscribing to the Network newsletter also pushes the member’s name, country, role, and organisation to the Mailjet audience as contact properties. Subscription status is stored on the profile and included in the data sent to the Net/CRM base. Two command-line tools are available for bulk operations: one to pull subscription state from Mailjet into profiles, and one to enrol all profiles in a given list.
Release date: 23.04.2026
New
For the full history see the repository changelog.