Drupal

The biggest challenge in designing the new site for the APC was in meeting the diversity of needs of its different audiences. The site needed to act as a one stop shop for: publicly accessible resources on open access to ICTs, a private members’ area for the diverse network of APC member organisations, and a virtual office intranet for the APC staff around the world.
This complex mix of audiences and content is presented in a clear and logical navigation with a raft of exciting features

Thanks to their innovative approach to using ICTs, WLUML was one of GN’s first web clients to use a CMS to manage their website. Within months of setting the sytem up in 2002, their flow of daily news stories and Action Alerts had picked up speed and content began appearing in French and Arabic as well as English. Since then, their site has become a unique resource base of thousands of articles documenting the issues and concerns of women whose lives are affected by Muslim laws.

PLRI is a project hosted by the IDS which aims to improve understanding of the issues affecting the lives of sex workers. The initiative is a collaboration of scholars, policy analysts and sex workers. It brings together research and advocacy material that challenges conventional approaches to researching sex work and that promotes legitimacy and labour rights for sex workers.
Working on an extremely tight budget we began by offering PLRI a simple basic Drupal installation for their content.

The CLTS project at IDS has spent the last years in a small corner of the Livelihoods Connect website. As the project, its reputation and its reach have grown, calls have grown for it to have its own purpose built website where all its resources and news can be easily sorted and accessed. Because of time constraints we took a phased approach to the web development – beginning with a very simple site that would be ready in time for their annual international gathering.

This site was built to monitor the communication rights debate and discussion emerging from the changing information communication technologies landscape. It makes a radical departure from conventional formal navigation systems by using free tagging to structure content. After struggling to come up with a one-size-fits-all hierarchical structure for the content of the site, we abandoned the hierarchy and developed a right hand menu which Drupal dynamically generates from the keyword ‘tags’ which writers have attached to their content, allowing readers to construct their own themed lists of articles.

Building Communications Opportunities Alliance (BCO) is made up of NGOs and donor organisations working collaboratively on projects based on communication for development. The alliance website needed a mixture of public and private spaces to present project news to outsiders, and share meeting minutes and draft reports in logged-in spaces between partners.

The public site of the International Development Education Association of Scotland (IDEAS) needed a robust and clear navigation that could serve a fairly diverse audience with easily accessible development education resources. Meanwhile IDEAS Members needed a private space for work-based discussion and access to internal documents.
Drupal’s finely grained permissions system made it possible for us to construct these differently tuned areas of the site with their contrasting access permissions and tools, behind a single IDEAS front door.

The Right to Education Project came to GreenNet with an already-made complex tables-based design mockup, and just 3 weeks to build a website and content management to house and manage the content. We used Drupal to create the initial site structure, and then carefully rebuilt the design without the original tables-based layout. Whilst the technical development work was going on, we trained the R2E project workers on how to use the system and they worked on getting their hundreds of documents of documents into the site.

Creative exchange had been managing their subscriptions and publication distribution operations with a complex series of offline databases. Their need was to consolidate the databases and integrate them with their public website, so that the data could be accessed and managed by any authorised users.

The Oxford Research Group’s intranet was designed to respond to the changing needs of the organisation as increasing numbers of staff began working from different locations.

Their requirement was to have an office intranet where shared files could easily be accessed, edited and stored by all staff regardless of location. They were unhappy with staff outside of the Oxford office (where their shared server was hosted), having to first download documents, work on them locally, and then upload them back to the server.
We developed an intranet for ORG that had a file store that they could experience as though it were on a locally networked server, regardless of location. So now all workers can open files in the file store, work on them and save them without going through the uploading and downloading process.

Global Dialogue runs a sub-granting process to support local NGOs by establishing local Strategic Funds, that support local democracy and human rights projects. GD first contacted us about a web project when The Strategic Fund for Turkey was created in 2007. They needed a very minimal ‘leaflet-style’ online presence that they could point their supporters to for more information. They also wanted something up very quickly. We used the Drupal CMS to create the site, and a generic theme for the page design. In this way the site works as it is, but can be extended and elaborated on at any time.

After a thorough needs assessment amongst the members of this global coalition, PWYP embarked on a major website rebuild project. They wanted a site that would serve up their resources in a simple and organised way, with an updated look and feel. Working together with PWYP staff, we devised a much simpler navigation that rationalised the wealth of content into 5 main sections. The reach of the coalition is powerfully presented using interactive mapping of members across the world.

We developed this site on a very tight budget for Bristol East Side Traders. Working with a page design that they provided, we built a simple and functional Drupal site for people involved in the arts in Bristol to publicise their work, and share information.

The DPU associates are a group of consultants who have all been members of the academic staff of the Development Planning Unit at University College London. They do research and training in the specialist field of urban planning for development.
In 2006 their coordinator approached us with a request to build a site which could be used as a simple store-front to raise their professional profiles and publicise their areas of expertise.

The challenge in developing a new website for the Institute of Employment Rights, was to create something as functional as possible without making management too complex for the overstretched staff. IER’s new website now comes complete with an up to date schedule of events, lists all the latest publications, projects and provides a secure space to subscribe online.

After completing the IWPR public website, we turned our attention to developing a private site that could form a useful virtual office for the distributed team of writers, trainers and researchers who work for the organisation. The private workspace was built using Drupal, and includes a calendar and special file management system – developed specifically for this project, but now available to all Drupal-driven sites. The file store area allows for workers’ local files to be organised and shared in the folders of the Intranet using a ‘drag & drop’ method.