Civitas Institute - Public Policy Site

Civitas Institute is a research and public policy organization in Raleigh, North Carolina. We recently worked with Civitas to relaunch their site in Drupal 5.2. They were previously using a cumbersome proprietary content management system. The new site includes event, donation, and newsletter systems powered by CiviCRM.

URL: http://www.nccivitas.org

Theme Creation
We built the theme from scratch using the excellent Pro Drupal Development theming chapter as a starting point. The administration section uses the Garland theme. The items on the right side of the homepage are blocks. We used Views to generate all of the archive pages and all of the mini-articles on the homepage.

We ended up adding our own menu instead of using the Drupal one. We are using taxonomy terms to help the menu figure out the current page. A body id is generated from a taxonomy term name. The css class listed on each page is a child term of the body id term. The search box was themed with a search-theme-form template file. The little search magnifying glass comes from the button css.

Helpful Modules
Here are some of the modules we used to build the site.

Administration Menu
CCK
Views
CiviCRM
Actions
FCKeditor
IMCE
Pathauto
Calendar
Workflow
LoginTobbogan

We ended up customizing the mediafield_display, profile, civicrm_subscribe, civicrm_theme, profile and user modules to meet our needs.

CiviCRM
The site uses CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviEvent. We tried at first to use simplenews instead of CiviMail but found that as the number of contacts grew, it was difficult to navigate through simplenews. Although CiviMail was somewhat difficult to set up, we think it will be a good long-term solution.

Thank you to the Drupal community for all of your support!