The previous version of the site was built using Drupal 6 and Organic Groups to allow members and staff to create and moderate discussions among site members.

Leveraging the translation capabilities available in Drupal 7, iKNOW Politics now has moderated discussions with approved comments that are simultaneously translated into the other languages, published and linked back to the original comment. Previously, staff managed comment translations offline- selecting comments to translate and then publishing them back to the group- manually. In addition, various translation modules and staff training has empowered iKNOW Politics staff to continue to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and resources on gender and political participation across four languages.

iKNOW Politics
Why Drupal was chosen: 

As a project created and funded by five international organizations, iKNOW Politics provides a shared knowledge network for women in politics and offers tools and resources in Arabic, English, French and Spanish. As a membership driven website with an active community of more than 9,000 members, Drupal continues to be the perfect solution for iKNOW Politics.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics, iKNOW Politics, works to increase the participation and effectiveness of women in politics by using technology to:

  • Provide access to critical resources
  • Stimulate dialogue
  • Create knowledge and share experiences on women's political participation

Website Goals

  • Provide access to resources and experts
  • Create knowledge through multilingual discussion circles and expert responses to member queries
  • Share experiences by using tools designed to facilitate lessons learned and best practices

Technical specifications

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

We used Localized Drupal Distribution to get a head start with the localization process. For translation, we choose not to use entity_translation and instead went with the more typical node-based translation because it was easier to use Translation Management (tmgmt). The automated translation system is based on the foundation of tmgmt with Microsoft's Translator support.

The theme is based on Framework (http://drupal.org/project/framework), heavily customized for IKP.

Theme features:

  • General placement and formatting to basic Drupal elements
  • Supports one, two, and three-column layouts with source ordering
  • Supports up to 3 sidebars
  • CSS file is highly organized, including a table of contents, section flags, alphabetical properties, etc.
  • Includes a CSS reset and a list of CSS utility classes
  • Em based text sizing with vertical rhythm
  • Clean and simplified code and file structure
  • Uses HTML 5 structural markup
Community contributions: 

1. External Language Interface - ELI
https://drupal.org/project/eli

2. Comment Translate - l18n_comment
https://drupal.org/project/comment_translate

3. Patched Content Subscriptions
4. Patched Feeds module
5. Modified Chrome Frame so that IE users would get redirected to Chrome Frame for Arabic

Project team: 

Drupal Design and Development by Fuse IQ.

Knowledge Library Landing Page
Library Search Page
Spanish Discussion Circles Page
Sectors: 
Community
Education
Government
Non-profit