Search support: Drupal

During more than 50 years of work on construction for natural disaster preparedness, James Lewis has published numerous chapters and papers on vulnerability to natural hazards, corruption, island vulnerability), climate change, and their interconnections with socio-economic capacity and development.

The Freshwater Action Network came to GreenNet in 2011 with an already-built global website. We worked together with FAN to make a schedule and coherent plan for developing and maintaining the global site, and then turned our attention to a new micro-site for their members in Mexico. Using the same underpinning database, we were able to create a site that both stands alone and works together with the global site. It seamlessly features global content where appropriate, but is firmly grounded design and content-wise in its Mexican user base.

Publish What You Pay's global coalition of transparency advocacy organisations has come a long way in the years since we rebuilt the site with Drupal in 2008. And there was a growing sense that the Where We Work section wasn't properly keeping pace with the range of members or their activities. So we took a fresh look at the mapping, the navigation and the page layout.

NSWP's old online home was made up of a Wordpress blog and and Plone database of resources. Keeping things together, findable and updatable was becoming increasingly difficult, and serving the needs of a multi-lingual membership spread out in groups around the world had fallen by the wayside. Our brief was to build a new home for the network that would bring together all NSWP's resources and news with an obvious spotlight on key publications such as the Making Sex Work Safe handbook and the Research for Sex Work archive.

The last PI website rebuild was back in 2004 when we devised what felt like quite an innovative way of cross referencing content. But as is the way with our line of work, what seemed cool and groovy in 2004 had become pretty clunky and out-moded by 2010 (or probably even sooner for web fashionistas). And so the challenge 6 years on, was to refit the ship without losing any of its precious cargo and at the same time get that cargo out of the hold so that people could find it, read it and start taking action on it. And to do all that on very limited resources - of course.

This was a project to create an archive space which would allow 3 years of  research by WLUML and the IWE to endure beyond the lifetime of the project. The site took its design cue from WLUML, with distinct touches that give it both its own identity and a clear sense of relatedness with its mother site.

We used a nifty SWF (Flash) tool to cleverly embed the wealth of Images, PDF, video and audio material inline in the site's web pages, bringing all content to the surface of the site. And as you'd expect with Apache Solr technology, it's a breeze to find the documents you're looking for, and plenty more that you wish you'd known about before.

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.

This Open Society initiative was set up to conduct research into the impact of privatisation in education around the world. The website was required to help with the important task of generating interest in the research and its findings. With a number of international consultations scheduled within weeks of the website commission, we had to work fast to get the site into shape for its initial outing.

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.

After we completed the FERN and SinksWatch websites in early 2010, Logging Off was next in the queue from this stable. The project was borne partly out of a need to improve the update-ability of the Logging Off site, but also fitted into  FERN's grander plans to standardise their online platforms using Drupal.