Profiles

SIA Profiles is the directory layer of the Social Impact Award network. It manages the data models and public presentation of every entity that matters to the network: individual members, country teams, organisations, and ventures. Every profile page, team listing, and organisation overview on the site is driven by this plugin.

The plugin also provides the transient caching system that keeps directory data performant across a multisite network with hundreds of profiles spread across dozens of country sites.

Main features

Profile management

Individual community member profiles are defined as a custom post type and enriched with ACF fields covering name, photo, biography, community role, organisation membership, team membership, Slack identity, and contact details. Profiles live on the Play blog and are made accessible across the network.

Team, organisation, and venture data models

Country teams, partner organisations, and social ventures each have their own data model and post type. The plugin exposes PHP classes — SIA_Team, SIA_Organization, SIA_Venture — that other plugins use to fetch and work with structured data about these entities.

Network-wide directory

The plugin aggregates profiles from all country sites into a single, sorted, filterable directory. It handles the cross-site database queries and blog-switching required to pull data from a multisite network into a coherent list.

Transient caching

Profile data is serialised and cached in site-wide transients to avoid repeated queries on every page load. The cache is invalidated automatically when profiles, teams, or organisations are saved, and can be warmed or cleared via WP-CLI. Cached objects are kept lean by stripping unused fields from WordPress post objects before storage.

Shortcodes and template rendering

The plugin provides shortcodes for embedding profile cards, team listings, and recent-member widgets anywhere on the network. Templates are rendered using the data models directly, keeping presentation consistent across sites.