Beyond the Cycle
A charity site with an envelope intro, a moderated story journal and Zeffy donations.
Beyond the Cycle is a London non-profit supporting girls and young women with menstrual health conditions. The site pairs Elementor with a custom plugin: an envelope intro, a Journal where visitors submit stories for approval, Zeffy donation forms and a blog the team runs itself.
About the project
Beyond the Cycle is a non-profit social enterprise working in London schools and workplaces, supporting girls and young women living with conditions like endometriosis and PCOS so that pain never costs them school, exams or opportunities.
The site had to feel warm and hand-made rather than templated, invite young women to share their stories safely, take donations without eating into them, and be run day to day by a two-person team with no developer on hand.
What had to be solved
- A sensitive subject needed a warm, personal design, not a charity template, and the founders wanted to approve it before any WordPress work began.
- Young women should be able to submit their own stories, with consent recorded and contact details kept private, and nothing published until the team approves it.
- Donations through a payment processor would lose a share of every gift.
- The Head of Ops and the Founder would manage the site as editors, so every feature had to work from a plain WordPress screen.
How it was built
- Built the home page as an HTML demo first, including an envelope intro that opens into the site, and only moved to WordPress once it was approved.
- Wrote btc-core, a plugin with a Journal Stories post type: a front-end form that creates pending stories with consent and a private email field, approved from a Pending list.
- Embedded Zeffy donation forms, which pass the full gift to the charity, and kept the blog on standard WordPress posts.
- Recoloured the whole site to the brand pink, fixed the fonts, migrated to Hostinger, ran two QA rounds and wrote a Website Handover Guide with annotated screenshots for the editors.
What it delivered
- The site is live at beyondthecycle.co.uk and the founders manage stories, posts and team pages themselves.
- Every story goes through moderation, so nothing reaches the public before the team has read it.
- Donations arrive in full through Zeffy, with no processing fee taken from the gift.
Inside the build
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