World Food Programme relaunched in beta.
The official website of the United Nation's World Food Programme has launched its redesigned and re-engineered website: http://beta.wfp.org.
The World Food Programme is the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. It is the world's largest humanitarian organization. In emergencies, WFP is on the frontline, delivering food to save the lives of victims of war, civil conflict and natural disasters. After the cause of an emergency has passed, WFP uses food to help communities rebuild their shattered lives.
All of the website development and the platform engineering for high traffic was done by Phase2 Technology - driven by Drupal 6; and the eye-catching design by Development Seed. Both firms are located in the Washington DC area. The site was built in record speed – 9 weeks start to finish. It features profiles for each country it serves, celebrity pages, and thousands of pictures, videos and articles.
The site was previously running on a custom proprietary CMS. But project manager and open source evangelist, Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski has thrust the use of Drupal into the most prestigious heights of the international non-profit world.
Modules
The Modules used include: Solr Search, CCK, ImageField, Node Reference, Views2, Image Cache, Custom Page, Node Queue, FCKEditor and IMCE.
Custom development
In order to support the unique navigation and presentation requirements, a custom video section was implemented using Flowplayer flash video player. There was also a migration of a variety of legacy video formats to Flash video using FFMPeg. And, a custom image gallery implementation was created using Galleria javascript library.
Deployment
The WFP site will have a heavy traffic load. As such, a scaleable and fail-safe hosting environment was designed and performance-tuned specifically for WFP. Performance and scalability were rigorously tested before launch to assure that the system can easily undertake twice the maximum traffic requirements requested. The scalability potential is also outstanding.
Disclaimer
This post is not an endorsement by the World Food Programme of the products, services of the companies cited above.
