Apparently there’s a time in every web developer’s life when they “roll their own” Content Management System, and this was mine! After redundancy a friend introduced me to an ex-Olympic Swimmer and entrepreneur who had a nightclub promotion business.

Being a big fan of brutalism and theatre, it was an honour to spend some time assisting the national treasure that is the National Theatre.

Their ticket booking workflow was built in Drupal and I helped them understand what was going on underneath the hood so they could adapt it to their growing needs.

I enjoyed seeing behind the scenes at the iconic venue, and even got to see a show which was broadcast live to other theatres as part of a new initiative increasing accessibility of the arts.

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is one of the most recognised project management methods and practitioner certification programmes in the world. The Prince2.com website provides a range of training programmes in various formats to many countries, and I built the backend which powers this high-profile multi-regional commerce website.

Quite a complicated site, the data for the available courses comes in from external feeds and is then converted into products in order to be made available for sale through the website.

Another fun project, providing the backend to an interactive web application for children with Drupal playing the role of content, and asset, management, as well as interfacing with a postal service.

With an integrated parental approval process, this colouring app posted a printed copy of the line art, along with the colouring in the children had completed online, to their home address.

A decade before Apple PR their AR (Augmented Reality), I delivered the technology which powered AR for PR to celebrate the launch of Grrr!, the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary greatest hits album, the world’s biggest music AR campaign to date.

As well as seeing a virtual 3D animated gorilla when pointing your phone at one of thousands of locations around the world, I built the Drupal back-end which served the content to Universal Music’s uView mobile AR application where you would also see the tongue and lips logo in 3D when pointing your phone at the Rolling Stones magazine.

The Drupal Association is the non-profit organization focused on accelerating the Open Source Drupal project, fostering the growth of the community, and supporting the project’s vision to create a safe, secure, and open web for everyone.

In 2012 they opened up two seats on the Board of Directors for members of the community, one of which I was honoured to win as due to my community involvement I gained much support and received the most votes!

By far the project I’m most proud of, the work we began over a decade ago is now a public digital asset, saves millions of taxpayers pounds, and is called LocalGovDrupal.

After two years of both attending and organising meetings bringing councils together to encourage them to share common code, I was approached by Jack McAngus from Brighton & Hove City Council to help them migrate from an old system based on Cold Fusion to Drupal.

Working alongside another Brighton digital agency, I was involved in the Toonix project for the Cartoon Network. An online environment where players could create their own characters and customise them, Drupal powered the backend and I provided the integration design between Drupal and the front end.

As more digital agencies began to use the Drupal framework for their projects they often needed assistance when it came to more complicated technical challenges.

One such example is when Disney Screenings wanted to give free tickets away to readers of a national newspaper, printing unique codes on each copy of the paper. They also wanted to be able to track the usage of these codes.

This was my first opportunity to use the native Drupal Commerce functionality, which had grown out of the Ubercart project, and now powers sites such as Lush cosmetics and Cartier watches.

Launched in 1980, the UK’s leading, independent children’s book magazine, has reviewed hundreds of new children’s books each year and published articles on every aspect of writing for children. Sir Philip Pullman, CBE, FRSL called Books for Keeps “The most important periodical in the world of British children's books.”