APHICE

APHICE (Asociación de Psicoterapia Humanista Integrativa y Counselling de España) is the main professional association representing psychotherapists and counsellors across Spain. The association manages member certifications, professional ethics oversight, training accreditation, and public-facing communications for practitioners in the humanistic and integrative psychotherapy disciplines.

The project involved a full integration and development engagement on WordPress, inheriting an existing installation and extending it to meet the association’s operational needs. The core challenge was connecting the public website with the association’s internal processes — membership applications, certification status, training course listings, and document repositories — without introducing complexity that the non-technical team couldn’t manage day-to-day.

What Was Built

The primary deliverable was a member management system embedded within the WordPress environment. Members log in to access their certification status, renew their association membership, and download accreditation documents. The system integrates with a custom PHP layer that connects to the association’s database, bypassing the limitations of off-the-shelf WordPress membership plugins, which couldn’t handle the specific certification hierarchy APHICE uses: different levels for psychotherapists vs. counsellors, supervised practice tracking, and continuing education requirements.

The public side was rebuilt for clarity: structured pages for training programmes, a searchable directory of certified practitioners (filterable by speciality and province), and a contact flow that routes enquiries to the correct department within the association.

Technical Decisions

WordPress was the right choice here — not because it’s optimal technically, but because APHICE’s administrative team needed to own and update the content independently after handoff. Custom PHP plugins rather than third-party solutions kept the logic auditable and the association free from external subscription dependencies.

CSS was written from scratch rather than relying on a theme framework, which gave full control over accessibility requirements. The association’s audience includes practitioners who work with people with cognitive and sensory disabilities, so WCAG compliance was part of the brief from day one.

Outcome

The site handles member management and public communications for an active professional body. The non-technical team took ownership of content updates immediately after delivery, which was the primary success criterion for this type of association project. It remains live and active.