Think Local Act Personal (TLAP)

2024 · WordPress, Divi 4, ACF Pro, Divi FilterGrid (customised), Custom PHP

About This Project

Think Local Act Personal is a national partnership of people and organisations working to make health and social care more personalised across England. Formed in 2011, TLAP is hosted by SCIE (Social Care Institute for Excellence) and works directly with the Department of Health and Social Care, the Care Quality Commission, NHS England, ADASS, local authorities, and care providers. Their co-produced Making It Real framework is built into the CQC's Single Assessment Framework, which means the content on this site directly influences how care quality is assessed and regulated across the country.

This is not a small organisation with a brochure site. TLAP sits at the intersection of government policy, frontline care practice, and the lived experience of people who draw on care and support. The website needed to serve policymakers, commissioners, care providers, practitioners, and people with lived experience, all from the same platform, without alienating any of them.

I first worked with TLAP on the Making It Real website, which is a separate project in this portfolio. That relationship grew into the commission for this site, which is TLAP's main web presence and a significantly larger undertaking.

The Build

This was another collaboration with HopeWorks Branding. Adam and his team led the visual design and creative direction, and I built the site in WordPress with Divi 4. We sat in on stakeholder meetings together with representatives from TLAP, NCAG, and other industry experts, but the responsibilities were clear throughout: HopeWorks owned the design, I owned the development.

The build took approximately six months. That wasn't six months of continuous development. There were regular pauses for stakeholder feedback, content sign-off, and the kind of review cycles that come with any project involving multiple organisations and advisory groups. Working with national-level partners means decisions often need to go through several people, and building that rhythm into the project timeline was part of the job.

Scale

The finished site contains well over 1,000 posts, pages, and resources. That's not padding. TLAP has been producing guidance, research, case studies, webinars, videos, podcasts, and policy documents since 2011. All of that needed a home, and it needed to be findable. The site architecture had to accommodate the existing content while being structured enough that the team could keep adding to it without the whole thing becoming unwieldy.

Content Hubs

The site is organised around five content hubs, each functioning almost like a standalone section with its own pages, resources, and curated content.

Making It Real is TLAP's flagship framework. The hub links out to the dedicated Making It Real website (a separate build in this portfolio) but also hosts its own resources, blog posts, and guidance for using the framework within the main TLAP site.

Choice and Control covers self-directed support, personal budgets, and direct payments. This is one of the more resource-heavy hubs, with a large collection of webinar recordings, practice guides, and case studies aimed at helping local authorities and care providers give people genuine control over their own care.

Co-production is about involving people with lived experience in the design of care and support services. The hub includes the National Co-production Advisory Group's work, guidance on how to co-produce effectively, and resources from TLAP's long-running co-production programme. This is one of the areas where TLAP has had genuine national influence, including co-producing the ADASS Vision for Co-production.

Language focuses on the words and phrases used in care and support, and the impact they have on the people they describe. This hub includes video content, blog posts, guides for communicating about key topics like mental health and disability, and the Jargon Buster tool, which has its own dedicated entry in this portfolio.

Asset-based Commissioning is the newest hub, created as a joint initiative between TLAP and Social Care Future. It brings together tools, insights, and practical examples for commissioners who want to focus on what matters to people rather than just managing services and budgets.

Each hub has its own internal navigation, its own curated selection of resources from the library, and its own collection of related blog posts. The challenge was making sure each hub felt like a coherent destination while still being clearly part of the wider TLAP site.

The Resource Library

The resource library was one of the more involved pieces of the build, and it's one of the most important parts of the site from the TLAP team's perspective. The library holds the full archive of TLAP's published work spanning over a decade: documents, videos, webinars, podcasts, case studies, research papers, online tools, and more. It runs to over 16 pages of content and continues to grow as the team publishes new material.

Users need to be able to filter by topic category (23 categories, covering everything from the Care Act 2014 and commissioning through to mental health, workforce, and integration), by format (document, webinar, video, podcast, case study, research, online tool), and by product type (TLAP partnership products or resources from other organisations). The filtering needed to be fast, intuitive, and work reliably with a large and growing dataset.

The filtering is powered by Divi FilterGrid, but the out-of-the-box plugin didn't do what we needed. We made significant customisations to it so that the filtering behaviour, layout, and pagination worked properly with the volume of content and the specific taxonomy structure. Each resource displays its categories and format as tags beneath the title, so users can see at a glance what they're looking at before clicking through. The result is a library that the team can add to easily through the WordPress admin while the frontend handles the categorisation and display automatically.

News and Blog

The news and blog sections are separate areas of the site, each serving a different purpose. News covers announcements, policy updates, and external developments relevant to TLAP's work. The blog hosts authored pieces from TLAP staff, NCAG members, associates, and guest contributors. Each blog post is attributed to its author, and the content ranges from personal reflections on lived experience to analysis of policy developments.

Both sections are paginated and integrated into the relevant hubs. A blog post about language, for example, will appear both in the main blog listing and within the Language hub's curated blog section. This means the TLAP team only has to publish a post once, categorise it correctly, and it appears in the right places across the site.

Events

We looked at several WordPress event plugins during the planning phase, but they all felt like overkill for what TLAP actually needed. The team didn't need ticket sales, recurring event logic, calendar sync, or any of the other features that come bundled with dedicated event plugins. They needed a simple way to publish events with a date, time, description, and registration link, and they needed the page to automatically show what's coming up and what's already happened.

So instead of adding another plugin to the stack, I built it with ACF and a small piece of custom PHP. Each event is a custom post type with an ACF date/time field. The events page has two grids: one for upcoming events and one for past events. A custom filter hooks into the query for each grid and compares the event's date against the current time:

add_filter( 'dpdfg_custom_query_args', 'tlap_filter_events_by_date', 10, 2 );

function tlap_filter_events_by_date( \$query_args, \$module_id ) {

    \$target_id = '';
    
    if ( is_array( \$module_id ) && isset( \$module_id['module_id'] ) ) {
        \$target_id = \$module_id['module_id'];
    } elseif ( is_string( \$module_id ) ) {
        \$target_id = \$module_id;
    }

    \$acf_date_key     = 'tlap_date_time'; 
    \$post_type_key    = 'tlap_event';
    \$current_datetime = current_time('mysql');

    if ( 'grid_upcoming' === \$target_id ) {
        
        \$query_args['post_type'] = \$post_type_key;
        \$query_args['meta_query'] = array(
            array(
                'key'     => \$acf_date_key,
                'value'   => \$current_datetime,
                'compare' => '>=',
                'type'    => 'DATETIME'
            )
        );

        \$query_args['meta_key'] = \$acf_date_key;
        \$query_args['orderby']  = 'meta_value';
        \$query_args['order']    = 'ASC';
    }

    if ( 'grid_past' === \$target_id ) {
        
        \$query_args['post_type'] = \$post_type_key;
        \$query_args['meta_query'] = array(
            array(
                'key'     => \$acf_date_key,
                'value'   => \$current_datetime,
                'compare' => '<',
                'type'    => 'DATETIME'
            )
        );

        \$query_args['meta_key'] = \$acf_date_key;
        \$query_args['orderby']  = 'meta_value';
        \$query_args['order']    = 'DESC';
    }

    return \$query_args;
}

The upcoming grid shows future events in chronological order. The past grid shows previous events in reverse chronological order. Both have their own pagination. If there are no upcoming events, the page displays a clean message instead of an empty grid. When an event's date passes, it moves from one section to the other automatically. No manual intervention required.

It's not complex code, and that's the point. The TLAP team gets exactly the functionality they need without the overhead, maintenance burden, or potential conflicts of a full event management plugin. One ACF field group, one filter function, and two grids. Sometimes the right solution is the simplest one.

The People Behind TLAP

The "Who We Are" section of the site is deeper than a typical team page. It covers the core TLAP team, the National Co-production Advisory Group (NCAG), the advisory group, the partnership organisations (which include major national bodies), and TLAP's associates. Each of these groups has its own page with member profiles and descriptions of their role within the partnership.

This section matters because TLAP is a genuine partnership. The site needed to make that visible, showing the breadth of people and organisations involved and giving each group proper representation rather than just listing names on a single page.

Ongoing Work

The TLAP site isn't a build-and-handover project. I continue to maintain and support it, handling updates, making adjustments as the organisation's needs evolve, and building new features when they're needed. The relationship that started with Making It Real has become an ongoing partnership, and the site continues to grow as TLAP publishes new resources and expands into new areas of work.