CivicActions

Act Now Productions came to us with project to create a website for their Environmental Ethics Curriculum. The idea for the website was to create a place to showcase and market the curriculum, and to provide a virtual space where educators and students (the two audiences) can interact amongst themselves and with each other. Creating a place where educators and students can share their experience and learn from each other over time and space was very important to the client.

Our team worked with Act Now to identify the specific features required and pick the best set of modules to achieve the goals project.

Among the principal challenges was deploying a site that allowed users to affiliate themselves with one audience or the other and also allowed them to create groupings of other users to share content.

We used the Organic Groups module to allow educators and students to create groups and invite other site members to join. Groups have their own content which can be private to group members or public to all site visitors.

Site members can blog about their experiences or environmental news that is aggregated on the site from various environmental news feeds. They can also ask questions or share experiences on the student and educator forums.

We used CiviCRM to track user and other contact relationship data.

Light announcement list functionality is handled through PHPList/Mass Mailer.

We worked with a design treatment and graphic assets provided by the client and the Blix Theme to create the theme seen on the site. Authenticated users have a different landing page then visitors. Nested heirarchical navigation is accomplished using the custom menus functionality of Drupal and a customized theme.