About IWPR:
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) began its work more than seventeen years ago. Today, it runs programs in a dozen countries to train local journalists, provide them with a global media outlet, and build sustainable media capacity within their home countries.
"IWPR gives voice to people at the frontlines of conflict, crisis and change. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, IWPR helps people in the world's most challenging environments have the information they need to drive positive changes in their lives — holding government to account, demanding constructive solutions, strengthening civil society and securing human rights..."
Design/Development Team:
ESI Design & Artgig Studio
To support IWPR's expanding programs and audiences, ESI Design helped IWPR create a communications strategy and website that demonstrates the broad range of work that IWPR is doing worldwide. The website features a navigation structure based on the theme of an "Arc of Change." The theme communicates IWPR's identity, and creates a clear way of expressing IWPR's mission to train new journalists around the world, build local media capacity, and establish an international network of frontline news sources. In addition to telling IWPR's rich story, the new website supports dynamic content from text, video, slideshows, and audio stories in more than 20 languages. IWPR's journalists are highlighted through profile pages, which link to stories they have written. Recipients of IWPR's annual Kurt Schork Award (given to exceptional local and international reporters) are also prominently featured at the site. Artgig Studio in turn handled the actual site build after a final design and feature set had been established.
Main Features:
- The home page and landing pages for each section were built using Panels which enables modular blocks of featured content to be swapped in and out easily. There are roughly two dozen different Views based blocks to choose from to highlight items like most read stories, special publications, editorial comments, featured media and top supporters to name a few.
- The bulk of the site's content is in the form of Stories. The Story content type is an expanded version of the standard Drupal Story content type with several added CCK fields along with associated taxonomies, Flags and Node References.
- IWPR chose Kaltura to handle the audio/video. Kaltura will be the backbone of a "media pipeline" which will ultimately provide content for future sister sites. For the main IWPR site, Kaltura CCK fields along with Image IMCE fields were used as part of the Story content type to handle all of the media. The end result is one story type that can take the form of a text, audio, video, image slideshow or mixed media story.
- Multiple languages were handled with core content translation along with the Internationalization module. Currently there are 20+ languages in use including several rtl languages. While the base elements of the site (e.g. main navigation) remain in English throughout, many of IWPR's programmes along with their associated stories are offered in several languages. E.g. http://iwpr.net/programme/iraq
- The multimedia gallery was built using Views. Sorting is based on taxonomy terms (Media Type), node reference (Programme) and publish date. Individual programmes include similar views based galleries.
- Content Profile was used to build Reporter pages which in addition to a basic bio, include a block of recent stories by each author on their profile page.
- Multiple roles to provide a basis for institutional editorial workflow
Other Features:
- Apache Solr Search was chosen for performance and the option of having faceted search.
- Downloadable resources for print which use File Field.
- Image based stories automatically generate a js slideshow if more than one image is added to a story via Image IMCE.
- Issues and Archives: Issues are collections of related news stories and Archives are collections of issues for a given Programme.
- Upcoming/Past Events sortable by date or location.
- Last but not least, 30k+ legacy articles were imported from IWPR's old site.
Modules Used:
- Apache Solr Search
- CCK
- Content Profile
- Custom Breadcrumbs
- Date
- Flag
- ImageCache
- IMCE Image
- Kaltura
- Location
- Nodewords
- Multilanguage
- CKEditor
- Panels
- Views
- Advanced Profile Kit
- Advanced User Management
- Clone module
- Custom Search Box
- HTML Purifier
- Integrated Metatags
- jCarousel
- Login destination
- Menu Block
- Page Title
- Pathauto
- String Overrides
- Syndication
- Taxonomy Manager
- Token
- Transliteration
- Google Analytics
- XML sitemap
