Ranked amongst the top 100 Best NGOS in the world (2012), IDEI (International Development Enterprises (India)) is a not-for-profit enterprise committed to providing long-term, market-driven solutions to Water management, rule out poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Based in New Delhi since 2001
About the project
Project Goal
Assisting the major stakeholders to find the right set of information and utilising that information across agriculture, Water Conservation and Fighting the Poverty was one of the major goals of the project. Over the years IDEI has collated a huge repository of content on products, case-studies, intervention programs and literally Gigabytes of content in each area. The challenge was in presenting all of the IDE work by sifting through this content and helping build a web-site that portrays all the work done in a well-constructed, pleasing and informative way.
Requirements
IDE had a website without any content management system, which in turn was hindering their growth in addressing the cause. IDEI had a huge repository of content which needed to be shared with their stakeholders and hence there was a requirement of having a CMS which could make the content management easier.
Challenges
The design of the website went through too many iterations, mainly because the client SPOC was obviously not well-versed with Software Development Processes and getting clear design goals was a challenge.
The content repository was *huge* and there was a real problem of plenty. Getting the correct images, videos and other assets of good quality, size and in line with websites aesthetics was a big challenge.
Drupal’s bad content update back-end hit hard. It took the client quite some time and many hours of hand-holding before being able to update content without help from the team.
Drupal hosting was also a challenge. The client had an internal policy that hosting and server decisions would be made in-house; the standard/popular Drupal Hosting providers were too costly for a non-profit. Our SysAdmin team had to work with the client IT team to get the hosting right. The site loading time is ‘still a minor issue at the time of writing.
Outcomes
The website was implemented using Drupal 7.x with redesigned UI/UX resulting in a peak high traffic for the website in just one month after Deployment.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen because of it's out of box content management capabilities, Community support, readily available contributed modules and themes, high-end security features were some of the key drivers for opting Drupal as a CMS for this Project
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Views There was a requirement of content filtering and Listing based on categories, inSlideshows Views is well suited for this sort of requirement.
Color Box Color Box module provides easy integration of popups that looks good on the website and is used a lot on the website.
Bootstrap Theme was chosen because of its fluid and out of box responsive layout.Bootstrap components were also utilised while working on the frontend of the website that made theming a lot easier and code is optimised
jCarousel Website required a lot of slide shows and various other effects jCarousel is one of the best available plugins that is suited for such requirements.
