CivicActions Launches MeNotMeth.org

The CivicActions team is in high spirits today with the launch of our newest project, MeNotMeth.org. MeNotMeth.org. is part of an $11-million California state campaign of billboards, bus wraps, cable TV ads and the website aimed at discouraging gay men from using methamphetamine. A statewide survey recently found that crystal meth use was 11 times more common among gay men than in the California population overall. Better World Advertising provided the brilliant design and wireframes which CivicActions developed and themed in Drupal. From the start the project we were under a tight deadline, due to a looming marketing campaign which included the website URL. Despite the pressure BWA and CA always remained friendly and flexible, contributing the the successful launch! The site functionality includes user-submitted video functionality (including transcoding lots of different file types), basic registration, content moderation, Spanish-language internationalization, a self-assessment module, and more.

Community Contributed Modules

In addition to all the contributed modules, one notable module was specifically developed for this project: mm_flvtool2 found at (http://drupal.org/project/mm_flvtool2) gathers meta data from a flash file and attaches it to the node. This is how we are able to display the length of the videos on the Your Stories page of the site. Of course, this is part of a bigger package of using XSPF Playlist and FLV Media Player which provides the flash player for videos and the TV commercial - both in English and Spanish. All uploaded video is stored on Amazon's S3, while displayed through Drupal, using the Arthur's contributed Media Mover module. Media Mover, XSPF Playlist, FLV Media Player received new commits and patches because of this project. For instance, flvmediaplayer allows an administrator to set the "style" of the player (e.g. foreground color, background color, allow full screen and more.

Full list of contributed modules in use with MeNotMeth.org

• flvmediaplayer
• google_analytics
• i18n
• imagefield
• link
• media_mover
• mm_flvtool2
• nodequeue
• potx
• site_map
• swfobject_api-1.2.6
• views
• xspf_playlist
• filefield

Other Cool Features

Drupal 5 of course includes great support for i18n (Internationalization) to add multi-lingual capabilities to Drupal sites. The entire MeNotMeth.org site is also in Spanish, which of course is never insignificant. The Community Resources page required a new content type and some customization to provide flexible grouping by city. Plus there's room to grow there as they may want to do some mapping in the future. The Self Assessment is another interesting aspect of the site. Robin created a new CCK type and through the theme ,and a little bit of customization, provides a nice results page based on the user's score. The team that completed the project deserves extra credit, especially Project Manager Joanne Pasila and Tech Lead Robin Barre who both owned the project from start to finish. Joanne and Robin really pulled this one off! And special thanks to the rest of the team of MeNotMeth.org including Steph (theming), Chris (theming), Alex (theming and lead engineering), Arthur (video magic), Zoey (IA), Hailu (QA), IanB (QA), and Jenn for stepping in at that last moment to take the site to near completion in the middle of DrupalCon! This is a great success for our entire team, and we couldn't be more proud of the results!