Sector(s)
Team Members
Yo! Wolves brings local opportunities together for young people, parents and carers. Big Blue Door collaborated with the Council’s digital team and young people on the website and its presentation, translating the Yo! identity into a responsive service built around finding events and organisations.
The initial project ran within a two-month delivery window, including six weeks of technical development across three fortnightly sprints. It covered design, a Drupal 9 content management system, a separate directory backend, React-based directory functionality, editorial knowledge sharing and AWS hosting. The initial release was ready for the summer holidays in 2021, with ongoing support and subsequent enhancements extending the service beyond its first seasonal programme.
Business case and background
The Council’s Youth Engagement Strategy, launched in January 2020, provided the background to a new service connecting younger residents with opportunities across Wolverhampton. The immediate priority was practical: make summer activities easy to discover and help local organisations promote what they offered. The audience included young people browsing independently and parents or carers looking for something suitable for a child.
That meant bringing together information from many providers and allowing people to narrow it down by factors such as age, activity and location. Alongside events, the original service included information about organisations offering support. The Council needed editorial oversight without making every provider’s contribution a separate publishing exercise.
There was also a longer-term opportunity. Organisations can serve several audiences, and their details should not have to be recreated for every future directory. Big Blue Door, already supporting the Council’s corporate website since 2018, designed a central store of directory information that could support differently branded, audience-specific websites. Yo! Wolves was the first immediate use of this approach, with summer delivery driving the initial priorities.
About the project
Delivering for the summer holidays
The first goal was to provide a usable service in time for the 2021 school summer holidays. Big Blue Door worked closely with the Council’s digital team, with a six-week technical build organised into three fortnightly sprints within the wider two-month delivery window.
Design and implementation progressed together. June 2021 project records show the directory backend completed while work continued on the public interface, including grid, list and map views. The team also refined the presentation of event and organisation blocks and the treatment of logos. Knowledge sharing helped the Council’s team work with the centralised content model after launch.
The Council’s July 2021 announcement directed families to Yo! Wolves for information about more than 300 summer activities and events. It also described the new platform as a route to support and advice, extending its purpose beyond the festival programme. Council launch announcement.
Making opportunities easier to find
The original directory combined keyword and postcode search with filters and alternative views of results. Visitors could explore activities or local organisations through the information most relevant to them, including age and location. Responsive presentation supported people using the service on mobile devices.
Organisations could submit events for review by the Council before publication. This provided a way to gather local contributions while retaining editorial control. Event information connected visitors to providers, with booking handled through onward links rather than an in-site booking engine.
Accessibility was part of the brief, including a WCAG 2.1 AA requirement and ReciteMe integration. The website’s prominent accessibility toolbar remains visible in the current interface.
Developing the service after launch
Later work refined how families could find suitable activities. A July 2023 enhancement specification introduced HAF and free-event indicators and changed the main event classification label to “Activity”. The current events page includes Activity and age-range selectors, postcode and text searches, and separate HAF Event and FREE Event controls. These features give visitors more direct ways to identify relevant opportunities, including activities offered without charge.
Big Blue Door’s involvement also continued through hosting, support and maintenance. Subsequent release records cover Drupal updates, configuration changes and an editor fix, followed by a completed security deployment in June 2026 that included Drupal 10.6.11. These records place Yo! Wolves alongside the central directory and Local Offer in the Council’s wider directory maintenance programme.
A reusable foundation
The initial outcome was a working information service delivered for a fixed seasonal deadline, with access to more than 300 events and a moderated route for provider contributions. The architecture also established a central source of event and organisation data designed for reuse across audience-specific sites.
Ongoing changes show how the platform continued to develop after that initial release. More specific event filters and continuing Drupal maintenance supported its role as a year-round service. The project combines a focused public-facing experience with a content foundation that gives the Council options for future directory development.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal suited a service whose main requirement was structured, reusable information. An event or organisation is more than a page of text: it has attributes that visitors need to search and compare. The project used structured directory records and tagging to connect the Council’s publishing requirements with the filters presented to visitors.
Separating the directory backend from the public presentation was central to the design. The Council could maintain event and organisation information centrally, while audience tags created the potential to display relevant subsets on other websites. This made the content model useful beyond one campaign or visual identity and supported the ambition to avoid duplicating the same information across future services.
Drupal also supported the editorial control required for public submissions. The original service allowed organisations to submit event information for Council review before publication. This balanced broader participation with a managed publishing process and gave the digital team responsibility for the information appearing publicly.
The Drupal 9 implementation combined this content management approach with React for the directory interface. Big Blue Door could develop the public search experience separately from the underlying content administration, while retaining Drupal as the basis for managing the service. Its open-source approach also matched the Council’s requirement for a platform that could develop over time. Working with the Council’s existing digital team, including knowledge sharing around centralised editing, helped make that technical flexibility usable in day-to-day operation.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
