Drupal

We won the contract in 2013 to migrate Handicap International's online resource centre onto a new accessible platform. Asksource.info comprises a unique collection of information on disability and inclusion in development and humanitarian contexts aimed at practitioners and academics.

The collection contained over 8,000 items, including details of books, reports, websites, organisations, newsletters and pre-prepared key lists organised by topic area, and is the only such resource to reflect the experiences and priorities of practitioners in developing countries.

We rebuilt the site on Drupal 7 to a fully responsive design, and implemented sophisticated search options to improve access to the content. The new site integrates AskSource's newsletter, which provides subscribers with updates on new resources and allows users to log in and create their own listings.

We undertook a complex data migration which ultimately transferred over 13,000 records, ensuring that crucial meta information such as details of organisations, publishers are findable using search and keywords while retaining Source's scheme of key lists for topic areas.

We built this Drupal site for project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, run by Leeds and Lincoln Universtities. The site includes lovely graphic illustrations that were commissioned specially for the project, with a downloadable graphic novel and timelines showing the history of key disputes that led to the improvement of women's employment, workers' migration to the UK, and union involvement in promoting gender equality in the workplace. The project also offers a set of study tools for use in schools and colleges.

We began working with Right to Education team, based at Action Aid, in 2008. The original site was created as a home for the thinking of an educationalist called Tomascevski.

In 2013 The Right to Education team commissioned GreenNet to rebuild and redesign the site based on a simpler navigation with a single library to house all the resources. This new site is designed responsively and aims to feature new writings in the field and include success stories and guest blog posts.

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. At the same time they needed to make sure that the new site wouldn’t leave people disorientated and confused by any change in platform.
We used Drupal to build the site and wrote a custom script to automatically transfer over 2000 pages of the old site into the new database. We then worked with the Quakers to take them through the new approach to content management so that they could sift through and reorganise the imported data. The new system has also been carefully setup to redirect anyone using an old URL to the correct document on the new site.

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. Eager to benefit from improvements in CMS technologies, WLUML commissioned GN to rebuild the system in Drupal, and we are now proud to announce that all their existing content has been imported into a completely new site – faster and simpler for the people at WLUML to update, restructured with a guided search to make it easier for people to browse, and with a new look beautifully re-designed by wave. The site is now also set up to publish content in 5 languages – English, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese.

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.

The project kicked off with a workshop that brought together a range of Woodcraft people who collaboratively set out the site's priorities and challenges.That culminated in a comprehensive plan for the site and the database backend. Plans evolved into page mockups, wireframes and production sites, which were presented, discussed and tested by the Woodcraft Folk.

The result is a beautiful website (with page designs by Sarah Macbeth for wave design) which skillfully makes space for Woodcraft children to speak and show for themselves. And the cool funky tools like the online membership renewal, the guided search, the filterable calendar and interactive maps have found a wonderfully comfortable co-existence with the camping, peace building and cooperative spirit.

The Woodcraft Folk use CiviCRM to manage their membership, GreenNet has supported  them to customise and develop their CRM system since 2009.

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.

The challenge was to find a way of making their finely indexed and very diverse content, navigable by users approaching the site from a range of different content perspectives. Fixed hierarchical menu structures were rejected in favour of a faceted search as the central method of site navigation. This freed us from the head-thumpingly impossible task of constructing a single set of navigational pathways that would work for people regardless of whether theirs was a regional interest content, a case-specific interest, a process-specific interest or a thematic interest in the content.

The Faceted Search  uses the same approach to documents, as online electronics shops use for fridges and DVD players. You choose your preferred keyword starting point  to get an initial long list of relevant documents. And then instead of narrowing by brand, price, colour as you might for a fridge, the Cornerhouse site guides you through narrowing by relevant country, case, process or theme. In this way each user gets a search that tailors itself to their content interests.

With the navigation working smoothly, we then proceeded to import the legacy content from the ActionApps site, and elaborate the design to fit the new site schema. The result is a site that opens up their ark of valuable content to everyone without disorientating regular visitors more familiar with the old site.

Gyaan Yatra is an initiative of the Asian Foundation for Philanthropy, designed to animate debate and understanding of development issues as a way of raising awareness. And as part of this work it also cultivates a group of development ambassadors, young people who are involved in AFP's development leadership scheme. Now translating all of that into requirements for the website meant coming up with a structure that could provide:

• clearly labelled  background and news on global issues
• simple user-engagement tools for people coming to the site, wanting to ask questions, discuss issues and ideas
• regular updates by email for visitors
• useful networking  spaces for development ambassadors to learn and gain from each other's ideas and experiences

The site we built is brimming with opportunities for interactivity from a comment box on news stories, to discussion forums, to a notice board and instant messaging system for DAs. This makes sure that the site is kept alive not just by its dynamic team of GY staff, but by its readers too. Coupling all that with a cleverly customised version of Drupal's notifications system, there's also an automated mailout of new content listings to anyone who wants to subscribe.

Created for practitioners, development workers, activists and concerned individuals, this website provides comprehensive information and up-to-the minute thinking on all aspects of participatory methods in development, including.

• Participatory approaches for programme design and management
• Participatory research and communication
• Participatory facilitation and learning
• Methods and issues such as power, accountable aid and reflective practice
• Over 5,000 related resources
• Activities and events
• Blogs and opportunities to add your thoughts

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.
Graphic design for web pages was developed by Josh King-Farlow and follows his standard practice of using a fluid layout coding technique (percentage based layout as opposed to em or fixed width pixels), allowing the page to shrink and expand to fit whichever screen size you are using. Coding is also strictly W3C standards compliant.