Search support: subscription system

Our last announcement of a new site for the EIN in 2002 marked the beginning of a completely new approach to web development at GreenNet. The research and development that went into the EIN's case-building 'bundlemaker' software, advanced searching tools, membership management systems and secure access had application for dozens of subsequent projects. Nearly 10 years later we've come full circle and used the learning from all those projects to completely rebuild the EIN.

This ambitious project was set up to integrate the Woodcraft Folk's in-office membership administration system with their public facing website. The idea was to build a very modern system to underpin a site that supports Woodcraft kids, parents and office staff, without losing the special creative spirit and energy of the Folk that has endured since its inception nearly 100 years ago.

Down To Earth's old website dated back to 2002, and had built up an impressive Indonesian environmental justice archive over those 8 years. But the effort of manually coding and uploading content was increasingly looking like an inefficient use of resources - especially given the more user-friendly web management alternatives available. So DTE comissioned us to rebuild the site with new technology that would make it much simpler for workers both in the UK and Indonesia to share the load of updating the site.

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.

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.
We set up a new Drupal site for FERN with a French language sub-section, and a much more powerful publications search.

After years of working with 100s of html coded pages on a static website, SGR managed to raise the funds to get their website rebuilt with Drupal. The budget was tight so we worked together to prioritise their requirements and make a plan that would meet their needs without overspilling. A bespoke page design was out but an automated (scripted) migration of all the old html pages into the Drupal database, and integration of their subscription form with a PayPal gateway was in. SGR took on the mammoth task of tidying up the imported data and categorising it with their new  index terms.