Sisters4Peace.net Case Study (expanded)

By calshei1 on 23 Dec 2008 at 22:33 UTC

Summary:

Girls Helping Girls (GHG) is an international nonprofit organization that empowers all girls to transform their world by mobilizing them through a series of initiatives to Eradicate Poverty, Increase Access to Education, Improve Health, and Promote Peace.

http://Sisters4Peace.net is a social networking site that provides guidance, toolkits, and support to aspiring girl change-makers around the globe who are working independently from a team to launch their own projects and ventures. The site is guided by a network of Peace Ambassadors who provide additional mentoring, fundraising assistance, and expertise to the budding peacemakers located in their region.

LevelTen Interactive worked with GHG to plan and develop a flexible, informative web site that is both feature rich and easy for GHG to maintain. LevelTen used our knowledge of web best practices and input from key stakeholders to guide the design and feature set for the website.

Website Goals and Challenges:

In designing this site, we had several specific goals in mind, mostly for the end user.

Goal:

Because the site is geared towards teenage girls (specifically 13-20 years of age), it was a major priority to have a safe, secure website. We wanted users to have the ability to control the privacy settings and content included in their profiles and have the ability to “flag” questionable or offensive content or users.

Challenge:

The first major obstacle was profile privacy for members of the site. Using Drupals built in permissions system, we were able to set profiles to be viewed by only logged in, authorized users. We also gave the Admin user persmissions for full content control across the entire site.

Members are able to flag questionable content through the use of the Flag module. Normally, we would have used the Abuse module, but because it was not available for version 6 at the time, we had to use other options.

Goal:

Again, as the site is targeted toward a younger audience, we had to create a custom theme that would be both visually appealing and engaging for this demographic.

Challenge:

The custom theme had issues functioning properly with IE6 because of .png file transparency issues. These issues were not resolved, but the site works properly in other major web browsers.

Goal:

Custom drop down menu system for easy and convenient site navigation.

Challenge:

We were unable to find a module that suited our needs for this goal, so a custom menu system was developed in jQuery, and worked with Drupal’s built in menu system.

Other Challenges:

Because we determined that the typical community member for Sisters4Peace would not be savvy in web programming languages like HTML or CSS, we needed to provide the ability to customize the look and feel of content (like a blog) that they created. This problem is typically solved with modules like TinyMCE, but we had to make some minor code changes to the module in order to reduce the number of icons in the interface, thus providing a cleaner, more user friendly interface. We were able to release this back to the Drupal community in the form of a patch.

Content Types:

We found that one of the great reasons for working with Drupal is the ability to create a variety of custom content types with the community contributed module, CCK.

We used a variety of custom and core content types for this project.

• Blog
• Feed
• Feed Item
• Forum topic
• Landing Page
• Page
• Panel
• Profile
• Webform

Community Contributed Modules:

As with most Drupal projects, we ended up using a lot of community contributed modules, in fact, this project would not have been possible without the support and work of Drupal’s developer community. While there were a variety of modules used, we felt that the following were most essential to the project:

• Flag – Used for flagging offensive content or users, but is a flexible module that can be adapted to many unique situations.
• Panels – Used for creating custom page layouts.
• PathAuto – Used to create SEO friendly clean URLs, and for specifying URL patterns for different content types.
• Login Toboggan – Gives members the ability to login by e-mail or username.
• TinyMCE – Used to provide an easy-to-use content creation interface for non-coders.
• Webform – Used for creating custom contact forms.
• Views – Gave us the ability to create custom layouts for different information, including custom blocks, pages and RSS feeds.
• CCK – CCK allowed us to create custom content types, as mentioned above.