In January this year DFID began to publish details of every aid project in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard XML schema. There are now a set of XML downloads referenced from the IATI Registry covering countries, regions and multilateral aid activities, all delivered through a RESTful API, and refreshed every month with up-to-date data. DFID also publish a more human-readable version of this information on the Projects Database on the DFID website.

The Hewlett Foundation are the second organisation to publish in IATI format, and others are following on close behind.

Eating my own dogfood

Owen Barder blogged recently that organisations publishing data should be forced to use that data on their own websites – so that “eating their own dogfood” would drive up quality. As I don’t get the chance to do this at work, I’ve been having a play with the IATI data in my own time. Just for fun, you know.

Here are a few initial prototypes. I will blog implementation details in the next few posts, and include code.

Charting using amCharts

I first saw the amCharts charting tool in ForeignAssistance.gov, the US aid portal. The tool takes XML or CSV data and generate Flash or Javascript charts – pie, column/bar, line, bubble and so on. The tool is very straightforward to set up, and data can be set up using XSL transformation of IATI XML data.

These sort of charts would be useful to:

• get an overview of what a donor is doing in a country
• use as a widget on a site dedicated to aid in that country
• (if aggregated across donors in a country), provide an overview of what activities are considered important
• show past and future aid flows for a country

There are still some challenges – for example aggregating the sectors (health, infrastructure, water) rather than the very granular sectors listed.

See with the charts in action. Use 2-letter ISO codes to look up a country you’re interested in.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a tool that enables manipulation of internet data feeds using a set of pre-determined tools. This pipe retrieves the country file for, in this case, Uganda (UG), filters for currently active projects, and produces a list of aid activities matching those criteria.

Note: the IATI schema needs to have the XML directive added at the top to enable it to be read by Yahoo! Pipes.

These tools would be useful to:

• aggregate information for a country from different sources (for example through the IATI Registry)
• mashup using connections between aid projects and other indicators
• transform or filter the data without using XSL

Go on, have a play.

WordPress Country View

In the WordHack at last years WordCamp UK, the WordHack team developed a prototype to import aid data into a WordPress custom posts structure. As the WordHack was based on non-IATI XML, I’ve adapted this for IATI data.

In short, openaid.org.uk allows an import of IATI XML data for a particular country into a WordPress instance, creating a new Custom Post from each IATI activity (aid project), and dealing with DFID’s hierarchical project/component structure. The code regularly checks the data source for updates and creates new versions accordingly.

This could be used by a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) in a developing country to:

• aggregate all donor activities for their country,
• allow citizens to add comments on each donor activity using the WordPress commenting capability, and
• keep track of the changing nature of the projects through regular updates.

Here’s the example site with a very few test projects.

Next steps

These are just a few initial ideas and prototypes. Please add your ideas below, or, if you’re really keen, visit the new IATI Support forum and send in your ideas.

Disclosure: Although I work for DFID, these prototypes were developed in my own time and using my own equipment. Yes, I’m a geek.

Key features of this design, learning some lessons from the Adelaides work:

• Again, the design is a child theme of Twenty Ten. In fact there are only four files in the child theme: header.php, homepage.php (home page template), functions.php and style.css.
• The slider on the front page is Dynamic Content Gallery. I’ve used this in a few sites before and it works well for me. I did have a look at a couple of other sliders (and may update this one) but it is functional and easy to configure through the admin screen. I’m displaying a single Category (unsurprisingly called “Featured”).
• I used Gravity Forms for the contact form again. Liking it a lot.
• And this time I got to use Google Fonts. Very straightforward to incorporate in the site.

And I found out that it is possible to turn on page excerpts in WordPress 3.x by putting the following line in functions.php

add_post_type_support('page', 'excerpt');

The next stage in the evolution of this site is to concentrate on the content and refresh that to say something more about the personality and activities of the church. Now that more members of the church can “see” the design, they are better able to suggest improvements. We’re also hoping to keep the information dynamic by including a “grid” (sorry, some ideas are just too good to leave to gov) to be reviewed by the leadership monthly so that we can prepare material in advance.

Most of the photos on the site are by Jonny Ferry, who has a real eye for detail.

The new home page layout directs visitors to the area of the business they are most interested in, and each area of the business has a slightly separate visual identity (different colours, logos and headers). We’re also working on improving the content and making the site more useful to guests, nursery parents and events co-ordinators.

The key design and technical features of the redesigned site are

• Child theme of Twenty Ten. The theme folder only contains five files plus two CSS files, and uses a lot of the features of TwentyTen including header images and menus.
• Featured images are used to drive the different header images for the different business areas.
• All menus (including those in the sidebar for the different business areas) are controlled by the WordPress 3.0 menu system
• Gravity Forms has proved invaluable to develop simple, usable contact forms for the different business areas
• Introduced some more interesting fonts using font-face declarations (I will one day update to use Google Fonts but I couldn’t find the font I was looking for in their limited list).

I’d be interested in your comments on the design. Fire away!

The WordHack at WordCamp UK in Manchester this year was really exciting. By 4.30 pm on day 2 the team had created a stunning WordPress site that:

• Reads and transforms XML data on DFID aid projects into a format ready for import into WordPress
• Imports the XML into a WordPress Custom Post Type for each DFID aid project, creating new post versions if the source data has changed
• Links comments to the post version, so that someone can view comments in the context of the data at the time
• Displays the data in a clean user interface, focussing on the conversation that people can have around aid projects

User Story
The concept (User Story) of the site is that people (either UK citizens or citizens of developing countries) can view summary details of DFID aid projects, and can start conversations around individual projects. Ultimately, this may be best used for sub-sets of the full 3000-odd projects based around communities of interest, for example by a community within a developing country.

Why WordPress?
The new Custom Post Types in WordPress provide the framework needed to handle more structured data around aid project information. Other core features are the commenting capability, use of categories and tags for classification, and the built-in post versioning system. These would require a significant effort to write from scratch.

Credit to the Team
I was really pleased with what the team achieved, and it builds on work done at the recent Aid Information Challenge. It clearly shows what can be done with government information when the data is provided in a reusable format.

The keys to the success were:

• Shaun Hare‘s organisation was critical. He set up the WordHack wiki page, canvassed for ideas early, and allowed for discussion within the group.
• Getting ideas early really helped, as people could develop the ideas over a couple of weeks, and come to WordHack with a better-formed solution in mind. It also helped to break up the problem into a number of logical components that enabled everyone to do something useful.
• The skill and dedication of the team was phenomenal. Each person chose a different component and delivered something useful, and Chris and Shaun tied it all together on Sunday afternoon.

More details
The technical details of the site are available on the OpenAid project page on the WordCampUK Wiki, and we hope to have a Google Code project set up soon.

Next steps
The next steps are likely to be:

• Add Ajaxy goodness to the front page to allow the most recent conversations to magically appear, Twitter style.
• Make the import plugin generic to allow any XML data to be transformed into the Custom Post Type – possibly by providing a URL for the XML and an XSL transform.
• Create a map based on country data to show where the conversation is happening.
• and many more…

If you are interested in continuing involvement then please follow @openaiduk on Twitter.

New CED site, built using WordPress

Previous CED site design - HTML only

The key challenges in this project were:

Getting the design right
The design went through several iterations, as expected. But to be honest the most difficult aspect was working with the charity’s insistence on using a strong blue (#0000BD since you ask) for their logo, and trying to balance this relatively harsh colour with a more muted modern palette. However the client had some clear design ideas based on other sites they liked and it was straightforward to develop a custom homepage template to accommodate their ideas. We found the use of personas to be useful in adapting a very inward-looking site to appeal to a wider audience.

Timescale
The process took a bit longer than I had anticipated, for a combination of reasons. In particular as both I and the person I was working with have demanding day jobs there was a lot of time spent waiting for diary slots. Although elapsed time was longer than expected, the actual time working on the project wasn’t as inflated, but there a definitely lessons to be learned for the next time.

WordPress 3.0
I started developing the site on WordPress 2.9.2 but WordPress 3.0 has been in the margins for a while now. I’ve launched the site on 3.0 RC1 as that means I can make use of some of the out-of-the-box features such as the new Menu system (although it’s not quite 100% working in my theme yet – prizes for who can spot what’s wrong).

Other 3.0 features would be really useful, in particular the use of Custom Post Types to allow the charity to update specific metadata used for their development projects (at the moment they’re using Custom Fields which is a bit cumbersome for someone not that familiar with WordPress). But these will have to wait for the next iteration.

Hosting
I also advised the charity on moving away from their existing host (1and1) to a host that provides a greater level of support (including familiarity with WordPress). The choices I presented them were Dreamhost, Xilo and Bluehost (thanks to the wordcampuk mailing list for advice). Bluehost was chosen on the basis of previous good experience and price.

Managing the move was very straightforward – I used Bluehost’s SimpleScripts installer to install the basic WP site (was offered 3.0 RC1 which was a bonus!), imported from the test site, made a few config changes, and the client updated the nameservers for their domain. All done in around an hour.

So, a few lessons learned from this project, but interesting to work with a team who are clearly passionate about what they do. The next challenge for them is to build up more of a social network within the organisation (geographically dispersed, working in small virtual teams). I’m already thinking BuddyPress…

Adverts used in the Metro

I was able to help in a couple of ways:

• Helping them to set up the survey in SurveyMonkey. This was fairly straightforward, and setting up the survey in SurveyMonkey early enabled us to visualise the user’s journey through the survey, and to run some early pilots to iron out (most of) the inevitable “eh?” questions.
• Creating links and link pages in the BiG website, including setting up a new domain for use in print media – www.glasgowspiritualitysurvey.com.
• Designing a postcard and a set of adverts to be run in the Metro over a 4-day campaign period. (I didn’t take the pictures, they’re all from Kim and Gerd, two friends who’ve given permission.)

Survey Postcard

If you live or work in Glasgow City Centre, and would like to complete the survey, there’s still time!

We’d been at a retreat where William Perrin was the after-dinner speaker, and he was talking about how the web can be a powerful tool for community action. In fact that has been the focus of his work for the past few years.

Martin’s idea was to set up a community action site to try to persuade the train operator Scotrail to improve the service on the train line between Glasgow Central and East Kilbride. The trains often run late, and because the line goes down to a single track beyond Busby, passengers are sometimes kicked off at Busby station to wait for the next train, while the original train heads back to Glasgow to catch up on time. Hence kickedoffatbusby.org.

The basic content was the product of a 15 minute brainstorm during a coffee break at work, and was set up using WordPress (obviously) in around 2 hours. I used the Mystique theme as this provides a lot of smart controls, including a cool slider to set the width of the right hand column and a simple way to override the inbuilt CSS (credit to Martin for his work on the customised CSS).

I’ve also found these plugins useful:

• TDO Mini Forms – this allows any visitor to the site to submit a post without having to have a WordPress login, and therefore encourages community participation. To keep the site safe, the plugin uses Akismet to check for spam and permits moderation.
• Twitter Hash Tag Widget – to display any tweets with the #ekline hash tag.
• Widget Logic – this allows each plugin to be controlled using WordPress conditional tags, so that the widgets don’t need to be displayed on the sidebar for every page.
• I also wrote a widget to load live train times sourced from the National Rail Enquiries web service.

There are still some gremlins to iron out, but I think the site isn’t bad for a few hours work, and really shows the power of WordPress.

Do let me know what you think.

The site design is by Harrisment. I particularly like the colours and the crystalline shapes of the logo text.

Business in Glasgow (BiG) is a Glasgow-based charity helping people make connections between work and spirituality. BiG is run by two Glasgow city centre churches and aims to support office workers in the city by providing monthly seminars along with individual and group support.

The Challenges

BiG is a charity run by voluntary donation, and the key challenges are:

1. Make the site visually appealing with a clean uncluttered appearance.
2. Using the WordPress Posts to support monthly talks (including in advance).
3. Find a way to use the WordPress Authors facility to give detailed speaker biographies.
4. Enable non-geeks to be able to edit and manage the site.
5. Finding a way to manage monthly newsletters in a visually appealing way.

The Solution(s)

Of course, the main solution is WordPress. I had hand-crafted previous incarnations of the BiG site but the WordPress back-office structure and ease of management was a natural fit. Installation on our existing hosting platform was trivial, as usual.

I wrote a completely custom theme with a Homepage template for the front page design that particularly highlighted the upcoming events and occasional features. At present I use a text widget in a front page widget area to manage the regular Feature of the Month. No doubt this will become cleverer and use a specially categorised post soon.

The visual design was influenced by the excellent photograph sourced from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence, and formed the basis for the use of warm and friendly purples and pinks. My initial visual design had lots of businesslike blues and greys, but that came over as much too corporate for the type of organisation.

To enable the future events to be displayed I usee WP_Query to build my own dataset for the Loop. I also used the User fields and description to drive the Speaker pages without using any additional plugins, just using the template tags.

For monthly emails I like Mailchimp as this provides full list management, scheduling and inline WYSIWYG editing. There’s no integration with WP but I don’t think this is necessary at this stage.