What they had...

Winchester Action on Climate Change (WinACC) was coming up to its first birthday and had a lot of plans to expand their website's features, community involvment and content. They had an existing blog-style site created using Wordpress that was fine as a blog but didn't allow them to expand in the directions they needed.

What was needed...

WinACC wanted to better let their visitors and stakeholders be informed of news and climate change related events in and around the Winchester area, gaining more control over how the site was arranged and stepping away from the purely blog-based format. They have many different Action Groups who need supporting with forums and a stronger web presence. They needed a website platform that could grow with their ambitious plans to create a strong low-carbon movement in the Winchester district.

The biggest single reason for the upgrade was to allow a richer membership system that would allow people to register, sign up to newsletters and report their carbon footprints. These 'Carbon Footprint Reports' are seen as a tool to inspire and motivate people to take resposibility for their carbon footprints whilst building up a picture of what people are doing to cut back and how much they're responsible for emitting.

The key criteria for the site was ease of use and simplicity for non-techies, so the membership sign-up and submission of user's carbon footprints had to flow as best it could - a challenge considering we required the user to leave the site and use the Act On CO2 carbon calculator, then return to the site to submit their report.

What I did...

I consulted with WinACC's Communications and Membership groups to establish what features they needed to provide a website to match their growing needs. I recommended the Drupal content management system because of its flexibility and power, so the first job was to recreate the old Wordpress of the website on the new Drupal platform and apply WinACC's newly designed custom visual theme. The old site was quite extensive and well established so I wanted to make sure the overall user experience was enhanced by the upgrade whilst utilising all the usual open source Drupal goodness - like integrated site searching, good security with fine-grained permissioning and great community support.

I used the fantastic Content Construction Kit and Views modules to create the required carbon footprint data types and views of the published Carbon Footprint Reports. This only got me so far, though, as other information and criteria needed to be added to make the system flow properly.

I had modified Drupal's user profiles to allow the capture of the information that WinACC required, but I then had to do some modification of Drupal's registration and user forms to allow the certain distinctions between individual and organisational members. I therefore built a custom module to hold the WinACC-specific code that handles these differences in data entry, validation and form layout, allowing the same basic data for a users and Carbon Footprint Reports to be handled in subtly different but critical ways depending on the type of user logged in. The module also modifies the flow though the website to ensure users are not lost on the way to submitting their carbon footprint.

The remaining tasks included adding a module to talk to existing mass mailing system (PHPList) and an enhanced forum to replace the old BB Press one. I set up nice HTML editor (FCK Editor) to allow content to be easily edited by non-techies - if you can use Microsoft Word, you can create content for the site. All that was then needed was to add the other ancillary features and link important pages together. A month or so after launch an events system with a calendar was added. 

If you're from Winchester in the UK, please pop over and join WinACC!

What people have said...

"Jim Kirkpatrick has played a central role in the development of the Winchester Action on Climate Change (WinACC) website.  Jim's combination of extraordinary technical ability, willingness to work as part of a team, and ability to innovate to meet the particular aspirations of the organisation has helped produced a website that is well used and much praised.  WinACC is greatly in Jim's debt." - Robert Hutchison, Chair, WinACC

"And my favourite today is Winchester Action on Climate Change, incredibly simple but those real stories and personalities that emerge in the 'any other comments' plus the local feel and the crisp design... - I think they have pretty much got it just right." - John Grant, GreenNormal