RightToMaternalHealth.org - IIMMHR

Funded by a small grant from the UK government, IIMMHR worked with CivicActions to create a brand identity, print design graphics for use on printed collateral and Drupal website.

Overview

CivicActions was able to complete the project within the specified timeframe and budget by using an agile development methodology and continually reassessing items and priorities with the client throughout the project. As a result RightToMaternalHealth.org serves as a strong example of an "Out of the box" Solution with Drupal.

Prior to starting the theming and engineering, the project's Technical Lead, Alex Scott reviewed the estimate and the client's budget only to find that it was going to be a tighter squeeze than we had hoped. In order to address the risks we split the project into 3 consecutive phases, starting out with basics and then moving towards more advanced functionality. In the first phase we would build all static blocks, introduce only 2 out of 5 content types, and we determined that we would use 2 columns instead of 3. The second phase would include building views and dynamic blocks, and the remaining content types.

The third phase, if there was time left in the budget, would involve taking a "finishing pass" to add anything that had been missed. As a result of a tight and effective working relationship with the client, Project Manager Justine Hirsch was able to shepherd the team through all three planned phases and complete the project on time and on budget.

Modules and Configuration

The site was built with Drupal 6 and a number of contributed modules including:

• Views 2
• CCK
  • link
  • filefield
  • imagefield
• ImageAPI
• Imagecache to resize uploaded images
• Token
• PathAuto (for SEO and friendly URLs)
• WYSIWYG API with TinyMCE
• IMCE plugin (for images)
• Admin Role
• Custom Breadcrumbs
• Mollom (for spam protection)

These modules plus others that come as part of Drupal Core made up the building blocks for this project. CCK let us create multiple content types with a variety of fields to meet the project requirements. The power of Views 2 made it very easy to deploy functionality like the resource search. Other than the theming, almost the entirety of the website was achieved through configuration of contributed modules, with one exception, we did create one custom module for hook_block generation.

Theming

As is becoming standard practice at CivicActions, we used Rootcandy for the admin theme allowing us to concentrate on the theming of the site itself using Zen as a base. In order to keep things as simple as possible we decided to stick to two columns with no variation between the homepage, view pages and node pages. We dropped the left sidebar region all together via theme_regions leaving little space for confusion in the blocks admin. Designer Jozef Toth provided a great homepage template, built on top of Zoey Kroll's robust and detailed IA, which was enough to define the styles, colors, fonts, etc for the entire site.

Client Engagement

At CivicActions we involve the client during every stage of the project. This contributes to the client's understanding of Drupal and how their site is put together. Having a client who is really engaged in the process of "owning the site" leads to a successful project. A 1.5 hour training over Skype and Glance (VNC viewer), across (or rather under) the Atlantic, was enough to introduce the basics of menus, content entry, and TinyMCE. After we created some initial nodes, defined an "editor" user role, the client added all of the content including pages, resources, and even a google map, highlighting affiliated organizations.