My Work
The Alliance for Responsible Trade is a U.S. nationwide coalition currently coordinated by the Quixote Center. The Alliance is the U.S. branch of the Hemispheric Social Alliance that focuses on developing alternative trade models, while opposing the destructive aspects of corporate-driven globalization.
For the Alliance site, I adopted Drupal 4.7 and the new views module to create sophisticated listings of content grouped by category, language and audience. The theme is an adaptation of the "news site" theme for 4.7 and the graphic design is my own.
I'm happy with this design given the time constraints of it's construction, but if I had to do it again, I would focus the design around several featured images, even if these change very infrequently, because the content from users is very text-heavy.
The University of Florida summer program in Nicaragua is an opportunity for students in the university's non-profit management and international development curriculums to see the real NGO experience in the western hemisphere's second poorest nation. The students spend six weeks in Nicaragua, which consist of three two-week stints with different NGOs. The goal of the website is to provide prospective participants with information about the program. An original goal to provide a centralized blogging platform for students during their time in Nicaragua was found to be impractical, because internet access in Nicaragua proved to be quite poor.
I built the site on the Aberdeen theme with a custom header/logo and custom color highlighting. The site uses core Drupal features such as blocks and pages to present most of the content. A major component in the success of this site was the training that allowed program staff to update the site themselves and a good WYSIWYG editor (tinymce in this case) that helped them do it. The contact module allows prospective students to ask questions about the program and communicate with program staff.
The "No To Fast Track" campaign was a campaign coordinated by the Quest for Peace that attempted to pressure the U.S. Congress into letting President Bush's trade authority expire. The site was the centerpiece of an effort to collect enough signatures and money to publish an open letter in the New York Times.
I built the site on Drupal 5 with heavy use of the views module and lots of work on the graphic design and some custom theming. There is also some use of panels2. I rotated custom text and visuals using the views random function to keep the site as a whole looking alive and different on each visit. Daily blog updates and the changing list of latest signers provided fresh information. The site also used a custom module that read tracking codes out of incoming hits to pass along information about conversion rates (our payment processor at this time was incompatible with the Democracy in Action tracking system). We also did some interesting theming work to output the lists of signers for printing and web display. My partner in developing this integration was Andy Laken. I was happy with the look of the site and the user experience.
The campaign was a success once the goal was downsized to a more appropriate one of publishing the same letter in The Hill newspaper in Washington DC. Congress for once didn't fold and the President's trade authority was allowed to expire in 2007.
The New Orleans People's Summit was a conference held in New Orleans to contrast the reality of destruction of that city with the grand schemes of progress that lived only in the rhetoric of hemispheric elites. The conference website provided information on the event to conference-goers and publicized the conference.
The site is fairly straightforward and was built in an accelerated period over several days. The conference organizers were in charge of adding content after I handed over the keys, requiring several over-the-phone training sessions and ultimately proving the user-friendliness of Drupal.
The site uses a theme adapted from SEOposition with lots of custom colors. The site uses panels2 for layout and views for building listings of events and supporting organizations. Some embedded Google maps of conference venues and the book module for a long public education piece rounded out the site.
Haiti Reborn is a program that works on behalf of Haiti in the United States, advocating for the cancellation of Haiti's unjust foreign debt and for fair U.S. foreign policy towards Haiti, while working with Haitian partners to improve Haiti's environment and and rural economy and to improve the status of women in Haiti. In the last several years, Haiti Reborn has also repeatedly had to respond to major natural disasters in Haiti that devastated the communities the program works with.
This site was set up in early 2006 on Drupal 4.7. The site presents the work of the program simply and directly. Democracy in Action donation forms and email sign-ups allow supporters to donate or request more information. For Haiti Solidarity Week 2007 I used CCK to allow users to submit events they were planning for the week. The site also served as a testbed for various approaches to WYSIWYG editing, with a stripped-down configuration of TinyMCE winning out. The theme is blix with a custom header and re-styled primary links.
The site has worked well and continues to be a good tool for getting out information about Haiti to U.S. constituents. The site has also provided the infrastructure for several successful fundraising campaigns.
The goal of the Women's Justice Coalition was to encourage participation by Catholics in a survey of the status of women in as many U.S. Catholic Dioceses as possible. The site consisted of a description of the mission and organizations involved in the Coalition, content examining the role of women in the U.S. Catholic Church, an introduction and invitation to participate in the survey and the survey itself. The Coalition then issued a long report and a shorter "report card" for the U.S. Catholic Church based on the information gathered through the site.
The survey was a complex questionaire with branching questions that proved too advanced for the drupal survey modules. Instead I set up a separate instance of phpsurveyor which performed well after a very challenging setup but offered little integration of users etc. This site featured use of the new views module for Drupal 4.7 and my first use of the Drupal stock forums, which performed acceptably. The big lesson for the forums was to start out with only one forum and seed it with topics before launch in order to have the appearance of an active community. Nothing says dead project like a dead forum. I created the logo of the site and adapted the pushbutton theme to be what you see on the site today.
Overall, the site and the campaign were a modest success, but the lack of a media strategy around the release of the final report card made much work by many volunteers disappear with far too little impact.
I created the Barolet.org site to replace the many reply-all emails that had developed over time as the main way to share news in my family. The site provides a photo sharing platform, a place for family news articles and a place to share stories about family history. For privacy reasons, the website is not accessible to outside visitors, and all family members were given log-ins at launch.
In order to create a family directory that could be kept up to date by the family members themselves, I used the user import module, the usernode module and several other modules to create profiles that could be sorted and filtered by the views functions in Drupal 5. I used the Gallery2 integration module to integrate that platform into the Drupal site. The theme is marinelli, with the primary links tabs taken from the top and moved into the center of the design. A rotating header image showcased the many old family photos we were able to dig up for inclusion in the site.
