The start of the project required using the base Infochange.net.au theme, but then changing the colours and images. Having the theme on hand meant the website was very quick to get up and running, if the website required its own branding some functionality would have been dropped. Maybe a lesson in there somewhere about keeping a generic template on stand by for those time-sensitive sites.

So with minimal theming done, the functionality could start being built.

News

The news section is fairly standard. It required annonymous users to be able to post, with an email being generated to an admin each time one is posted.

I considered the Workflow module, but having used that is a previous project, I knew this might take a while and it might be better to work with the more light weight Rules module.

Using the Rules module the workflow for the news, and forum topics were setup very quickly…perhaps 15 minutes.

Assistance Pages

The I can assist, I need assistance and Donate pages used the webform module, as these results only needed to be viewed by an administrator, and didn’t need anything to be viewable on the website. The only feature here that may have been nice would be an auto-reply email function, although perhaps I could have used the Rules module for this.

Using Google maps

The Google Map integration to map technology hubs was the part I spent a majority of time on. There are lots of options that can be set, both in the Gmap and Location modules, so it takes a while to familiarize to everything.

Being able to set the window and centering of the maps were important. When creating the maps, using the views module you can set a macro for a default zoom level, location and map size. (Under “General settings” -> Style -> Gmap -> Cog Icon)

There is more information about macros in Admistration -> Site Settings -> GMap Location. I pretty much copied the macros from here, and edited as needed.

Another key item in a map view is to set it so it uses fields rather then node for its “Row Style”. The default “node” setting displayed the item in a box that was often to big for the map window.

Rather then set these views as pages, I used the Insert View module to place the maps where they were needed. This way they could be placed within content, unlike a Block view.

Below are some of the modules used in the project.

Module List

• Content Construction Kit
• Contact – For the contact form
• Forum – Just the core forum implementation, although may consider Advanced Forum if need arises
• Gmap – To display node locations such as the Technology Hubs
• Location – Needed for Gmap, to save location information
• FCKEditor – WYSIWYG editor of choice
• IMCE - Integrates fairly simple to use image management with FCKEditor
• PathAuto
• Webform – Used on the “Donate”, “I can assist” and “I need assistance” pages to send the results of the form submission to the administrator
• Rules - To add a few actions to the public posting of news and forum topics
• Google Analytics
• Insert View - Makes it easy to put some views into the pages you want. Useful when wanting to put a Google Map view into a page.
• Views – Used mainly in conjuction with the maps, but also for the archive in the news area.
• UserProtect – A nice module if you want to protect the root user from being changed.

I’m hoping some extra features may come in the near future (One would be a captcha!)

www.bushfirerelief.infoxchange.net.au

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