MDS UK Patient Support Group — WordPress and Forum Rebuild

Responsive rebuild for a 400,000-visitor patient community

MDS UK Patient Support Group is a charity supporting patients, family members, and carers living with myelodysplastic syndromes — a group of blood cancers with significant impact on daily life. Their website combines a WordPress brochure site with an active phpBB discussion forum covering patient experiences, treatment questions, and mutual support. With over 400,000 visitors per year and growing mobile usage, the site needed a significant technical update to remain accessible, secure, and easy to navigate.

The Challenge

A patient community site has unusual constraints: sensitive content about serious illness requires careful moderation and spam protection; the audience includes people who are ill, elderly, or unfamiliar with technology, so navigation needs to be genuinely clear rather than just adequate; and the scale of the forum — thousands of threads spanning years of patient discussion — means any redesign must preserve content integrity without disruption to an active community.

More than half of visits were now coming from mobile devices and tablets, but the existing site had not been designed with mobile in mind. The responsive update was the most visible part of a wider rebuild that touched navigation structure, search integration, and forum security.

What We Built

We carried out a responsive redesign of both the WordPress front end and the phpBB forum, alongside targeted improvements to security and usability:

• Responsive redesign of the WordPress theme and phpBB forum template — tested across desktop, tablet, and mobile to serve users on all devices equally
• Anti-spam infrastructure integrated into the forum layer, reducing moderation overhead on sensitive health content without adding friction for legitimate members
• Improved site navigation restructured so patients could move between news, events, forum sections, and information pages without getting lost
• Unified search covering WordPress content and phpBB threads simultaneously — one search for the whole site
• Custom plugin development for site-specific functionality not available off the shelf
• Multiple layout templates to distinguish between content types — news, events, forum landing pages, and information sections

Frequently Asked Questions

Can WordPress and phpBB work together on the same site?

Yes, with custom integration work. They run as separate applications but can share a consistent theme, unified navigation, and cross-site search. The integration requires custom development — matching templates, shared header and footer, and a search layer that covers both platforms simultaneously.

How do you protect a health forum from spam?

Spam protection on a sensitive medical forum requires multiple layers — registration verification, CAPTCHA, IP-based filtering, and moderation workflows. We implemented a combination appropriate for the MDS forum's scale and the sensitivity of the content being protected.

How do you handle a site redesign without disrupting an active community?

Carefully. The forum content and user accounts must be preserved completely — the redesign affects presentation, not data. We tested the responsive update on a staging environment before any live deployment, and worked with the MDS team to communicate changes to active forum members in advance.

About This Project

We build and rebuild WordPress sites for charities, patient organisations, and non-profits. Get in touch to discuss your requirements.