Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is one of the world’s leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges of international development. For nearly 40 years, IDRC has worked in close collaboration with researchers from the developing world in their search for the means to build healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous societies.
Building a community driven drupal site to support the African Network for Localization.
This was our first project with Drupal 6. We used views and CCK when they were still in their early stages. It was great fun and we learned a lot along the way.
In an age of globalization, the most pressing need is surely to create a balance between societies and cultures worldwide. We believe that information technology is playing a crucial role in establishing that balance, and we are always keen to participate in ICT4D projects. Because open source and social development share many values, we've found that our sustainable solutions are embraced by the communities that we help empower.
As part of OpenCraft's commitment to contributing to ICT4D and software localization, Abdel-Karim Mardini from OpenCraft is participating in The second workshop of the Pan African Localisation project, "PAL2" which is being held in Tshwane, South Africa, on 5-7 November 2007.Read more
The Egyptian Ministry of State For Environmental Affairs requested a bilingual dynamic web portal focusing on Egypt's Natural Parks. The initiative is known as "Parks Egypt" and its mission is to maintain a well-managed, representative system of parks conserving natural resources, contributing to sustainable economic growth and providing education, inspiration and enjoyment for all. The web portal is an integral part of this initiative since it is providing a plethora of information about Egypt's natural parks as well as building a thriving community of nature enthusiasts, and encouraging an appreciation of the environment’s inherent values and beauty. The portal allows users to share information, start discussions, subscribe to newsletters, inform the community of events, and get feedback from visitors. It also allows rangers and other registered users to blog about their experiences, observations, and share their ideas with their peers. OpenCraft was responsible for the following:
* Developing the portal, theme and all required functionality
* Deploying the portal and ensuring its technical maintenance
* Training the ministry's staff on uploading and editing content as well as fully administering the portal which included adding new parks, new photos, and new sections to the site
The open source content management system [[drupal|Drupal]] was used to implement the Parks Egypt portal. OpenCraft designed, configured, customized and extended the system to fulfill the client needs. The list of features developed include:
* Ability to add a new Park along with its map, sections, attractions, and photo gallery without the need to involve any technical staff. This has been done using Drupal's relativity module in conjunction with the CCK and views modules
* Having a different color theme for each region in Egypt which required extensive customization of the template code
* Ability to browse parks by interest and activity
* Ability for certain user roles to publish and read blogs
* Restricting access to certain content to specific user roles
* Development of a new module to handle the translation of views and search filters, and which was subsequently contributed back to the Drupal community
The Grameen Foundation launched the open source loan-tracking system Mifos to support its vision of microfinance. Because of our interest in the uses of IT for development purposes, we became members in the Mifos community and undertook to study the software. When we expressed interest in participating in the development of the system, the Foundation's Technology Center assigned to us the task of developing a module to handle the occurrence of holidays in the core meeting scheduling subsystem.
The first step in studying a new open source system is to understand its components. We developed a script to convert the Hibernate data model into a visual diagram using Graphviz and Linguine Maps. We also used code comprehension tools such as Creole to build an understanding of the static and dynamic structure of the system's objects.
With this understanding, we designed a solution that would minimize the amount of code needed to implement the required functionality. A major design goal was to make the holiday handling functionality transparent to clients of the meeting scheduling subsystem: no rework would be needed. After validating our solution with the Mifos development community, we began the implementation. We added a new Java package containing our re-scheduling algorithm, and patched the meeting subsystem in few locations to use that new code. We wrote unit tests to validate our implementation as well as its effects on other subsystems. The holiday handling code is now a part of Mifos.
Sanabel requested a bilingual dynamic web portal to improve its communication with its members, partners, and other stakeholders by providing an efficient and flexible medium. The portal would allow non-technical users to share information, inform the community of events, registers for trainings and workshops, start discussions, subscribe to newsletters, and get feedback from Sanabel's stakeholders. OpenCraft was responsible for the following:
The open source content management system Drupal was used to implement the Sanabel portal. Drupal features a large number of modules, that provided most of the required functionality. OpenCraft designed, configured, customized:
* About
* Solutions
* Portfolio
* News
* Jobs
* Contact
*Home
and extended the system to fulfill the client needs. This included the customization of the event registration module to automatically populate the list of events from the workshops and trainings database as well as extending the administrative interface provided to Sanabel's staff to be able to better manage the site.
SSRDP requested a bilingual dynamic web portal to improve its communication with its members, partners, and other stakeholders by providing an efficient and flexible medium. The portal would allow non-technical users to share information, inform the community of events, start discussions, subscribe to newsletters, and get feedback from SSRDP's stakeholders. OpenCraft was responsible for the following:
The open source content management system Drupal was used to implement the SSRDP portal. Drupal features a large number of modules, that provided most of the required functionality. OpenCraft designed, configured, customized and extended the system to fulfill the client needs. This included the development of a new module which allows users to incorporate Google Maps into the site, and which was subsequently contributed back to the Drupal community.
