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By Appnovation on
For more than 45 years, WWF has been protecting the future of nature. The world’s leading conservation organization, WWF works in 100 countries and is supported by 1.2 million members in the United States and close to 5 million globally. WWF's unique way of working combines global reach with a foundation in science, involves action at every level from local to global, and ensures the delivery of innovative solutions that meet the needs of both people and nature.
In 2009 World Wildlife Fund chose Appnovation to develop a Drupal based community website named Adaptation Learning Platforms. The portal is a community platform which allows academics, researchers and NGOs to collaborate together and look at how wildlife is affected by global climate challenges. It features community tools such as groups, discussion forums and user profiles.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Initially WWF looked at using Open Atrium (a version of Drupal), but they quickly realized that since the site is not a project based site, the Open Atrium version would not be as effective. WWF made the decision to develop their ALPs site on the Drupal platform because it offers all the community options they wanted to incorporate and is easily scalable.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The design of the Adaptation Learning Platforms was the focusing of the many ideas the client had during the design process. As it is associated with the World Wildlife Fund there were certain guidelines that had to be followed, but some leeway was afforded as it was a specifically purposed project site. Colour palette and typography were provided by the client. Wireframes were created in OmniGraffle and the base Drupal theme layer is Garland that was stripped down, re-built and named “Elan”.
Like most community sites the Adaptation Learning Platforms has user profiles, discussion forums and an events calendar to help like minded individuals connect. The homepage has a “What’s New” mini feed that updates as new content is added throughout the site. There is also the ability to create groups, open or private, for users with the same focus topic to discuss and collaborate on items like case studies and create a specific group blog. A specialized user dashboard was created so users could have all their options available to them from one location.
The portal’s other focus is research and information. It features a library that stores case studies, reports and news items. Users are also able to access and create Wiki documents. This content is overseen by site administrators and is searchable by type, topic or author tags. The homepage also features a feed from the Climate Prep.Org blog with the latest news items and reports.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
- Views 6.x-2.10 - The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented
- Organic groups 6.x-2.0 - Enables users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves
- Bibliography Module 6.x-1.13 - This module allows users manage and display lists of scholarly publications
- Content Construction Kit (CCK) 6.x-2.5 - The Content Construction Kit allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser
- Content Profile 6.x-1.0-beta4 - This module builds user profiles as content (aka nodes), which opens the opportunity to use all the powerful modules for content for user profiles too, e.g. the Content Construction Kit (CCK). It's intended to be simple and useful, but is extendable by other modules
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Rexx Llabore - Developer
Basecamp and Active Collab were used for most project management tasks and WebEX was used extensively for information sharing.
Sectors:
Community
Non-profit
