Moroccan Society of Cardiology: a members' area

The Moroccan Society of Cardiology brings together more than 800 cardiologists — academics, specialists and trainees, across public and private practice — working on practice guidelines, prevention and continuing medical education.

Like the interns' association I had built for two years earlier, they had never had a website, and were running a national membership on email and paper.

What they needed was the members' side

The public pages were the easy half, and the smaller one. What the society did not have was anywhere for its members to actually be:

• Somewhere to talk. Cardiologists spread across the country, in public and private practice, with no forum for a clinical discussion that outlived a single conversation or a single conference.

• Somewhere to publish. The society produced an annual magazine and had no way to distribute it beyond handing it out.

What I built

• Registration, and a members' area behind it.

• Discussion forums, organised by medical topic.

• A library of the society's magazines, listed and downloadable as PDFs.

• A news section covering the society's activities.

• A homepage pulling the latest news, magazines and discussions together.

That last point is the one that made it hold. A membership site dies when its homepage is static, and the cheapest way to keep it alive is to let the members' own activity be the content.

The outcome was the one the association a couple of years earlier had asked for as well: what had been done by hand, in one place, visible to everyone entitled to see it — plus an archive of the society's own publications that had not previously existed anywhere.

Built in PHP and MySQL in 2006. The 2006 site has since been rebuilt by another team; what is described here is the version I delivered.