Mytime Active runs gyms, pools, golf courses and leisure centres. The public site is Drupal: activities, locations, memberships, and booking. In March 2020 we were brought in on that existing build, not to replace it, but to add development, tighten Drupal behaviour, and keep the site maintained.
What we did
The work sat on top of a live Drupal site. We added functional enhancements in Drupal, wrote Python where a job did not belong in the CMS, and took on maintenance so editors and members were not waiting on a neglected codebase.
- Drupal functional enhancements: new and improved behaviour on the live site rather than a greenfield rebuild.
- Python: supporting services and scripts alongside Drupal, for work that was a poor fit for PHP in the CMS.
- Maintenance: keeping the site current, patched, and usable while they continued to take bookings and run the centres.
Why that mix
A gym and leisure website is a product in daily use: class listings, locations, memberships, golf. Rebuilding would have been the wrong answer. Drupal stayed the CMS. Python took the pieces that were easier to run as their own process. Maintenance meant the enhancements actually shipped instead of sitting on a branch.
Outcome
Mytime Active kept a working Drupal site through the period, with extra capability added rather than a rip-and-replace. The live site is still at mytimeactive.co.uk.
