This project began life as an attempt to create a subsite for the Cornerhouse's Interventions work - a space to publish and organise the paper trails of legal documents, Freedom of Information requests, press reports etc... that emerge during investigations carried out by Cornerhouse researchers. But as the project plans unfolded, it became clear that new thinking for that content would also suit their legacy content as that was beginning to out-grow the ActionApps system that was built for it in 2003.
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 The DVA is a new initiative of a group of UK organisations with a common interest in sending diaspora volunteers to support projects in their countries and continents of origin. DVA staff approached GreenNet with a brief to build a website that could quickly provide an online presence for the Alliance – a space for them to publicise the initiative’s aims, and stimulate interest from potential volunteers and diaspora organisations. |
 This rebuild project was timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the journal. Although the printed version has had an online presence for nearly 10 years now, this new Drupal site is the boldest departure DIP has yet made from its printed form. The content is still available in its conventional volume/issue listing. But the careful keyword indexing on all journal abstracts, means that you can now sort abstracts into topic and regional lists. |
 FERN’s European Union advocacy work is focused on protecting forests and defending the rights of forest peoples. They approached us in 2008 with a familiar tale of a website that was not keeping pace with the growth and change in their activities. More of their content was being written in French as well as English and the volume and diversity of their publications was lost in a system that didn’t index it usefully. |
 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. |
 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. |
 We made the initial connection with the Quakers through the Drupal for NGOs monthly gatherings. They’d been struggling for the last few years with a custom built CMS that was proving too inflexible to cope with new requirements. So they were looking for a new site that could take on all the content from the old site and provide the tools to make their online space a much more functional site for the various parts of the British Quaker community to connect with one another and their common resources. |
 AFP was established to connect the UK’s South Asian Diaspora Group with development initiatives in India. They encourage donations in money or time to marginalised communities in India. Their web project was designed to transform their online presence from a simple brochure site, into more of an outreach tool. The aim was to make the content more navigable, and to bring news of their work to a broader audience. We worked with AFP and their designer to create a more straight forward site structure, and built the site using Drupal. |
 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. |
 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. |
Web projects with Drupal
GreenNet’s current CMS of choice is Drupal. It is an open source system for developing websites and publishing content to them. A Drupal website has at its heart a database of the site’s content (articles, reports, profiles, events etc..). The system serves content from the database to the right pages of the site in the appropriate style, as they are called for by site users. Site authors can add, modify and manage their content in that database using simple private online forms.The advantage of this system for GreenNet members is that their sites can be updated by anyone who has authorised access from any internet connected computer. All they need is an ordinary web browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Once they have mastered the simple art of filling in the Drupal forms, resources and...
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