War Resisters' International is a London based international network of pacifist and antimilitarist organisations.

We are presently looking at a completely overhaul of our multilingual website (presently English, Spanish, French, and German, possibly more languages in the future), which would include a move to Drupal. The present website includes a range of materials not only in the four "official" languages, but also in additional languages. The website should also include a webshop/web donation facility.

However, as a small not-for-profit organisation, we cannot afford to pay commercial rates. We therefore are looking for a volunteer or a team of volunteers to share the task. We can provide a workspace in our office, and expenses for travel to meetings with staff in London.

If you are interested, get in touch with Andreas Speck (andreas [at] wri-irg [dot] org).

Some notes from our outgoing volunteer webmaster:

NOTES ON WRI WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT:  NOTES TO THE NEXT WEBMASTER

The first, and perhaps most important, point to be made is that all existing WRI files must keep their own names or (where this is not possible) there is a clear path for forwarding the old URL. It is important not just from the point of view of Google indexing of our existing pages, but the (probably) thousands of links, both external and external, to particular named files.

There is always a difference in the way a casual visitor and a power user navigates a particular website. Different things put them off, and different things make them feel comfortable. Power users tend to want a predicable, heirarchical structure of menus and sub-menus (such as a CMS provides) whereas a casual visitor tends to want something more descriptive and contextual. Our existing site attempted to combine these two needs, with a descriptive index for each working area or publication within the larger site, and simple locator menus which took the user back to each higher level. The most important consideration was that the casual user not be confused by multiple menu choices. Another consideration has been that the homepage ("From the Office") is friendly in tone and up-to-date, directing people to the most important content as well as the most recent.

LANGUAGES

It is my personal position that any  link page or index page should only link to other material in the same language unless it is absolutely necessary to "link out" to a different language -- for instance, if no translation exists and/or is unlikely to exist in the near future. On the WRI site, the From the Office page has been an exception to this rule, because (for a series of reasons) many non-English speakers use it as a gateway page in preference to their own (or their preferred) language page.

It should be clear to the user when they are leaving a page in one language and going to a page in another -- for instance, if you are on a Spanish page and click to either an internal link or back through the navigation menu, that the page you are taken to is also Spanish (and there is clear labelling if this is not the case).

SCRIPTING

We have recently experienced some vulnerabilities with our CGI scripts and one of our PHP scripts. It is by no means certain that a CMS installation will be immune from these problems, nor that the installation will not also need to have modifications which allow specialised functions, such as logging responses to file.

STRUCTURE

A sensible page structure is probably more important to Google than to the average reader - but it is still a good thing to strive for, if only for the overall discipline and for presenting a not-wildly-varying template.

For the existing website, structure has meant a few different things:

1) OUTLINE STRUCTURE. The article is divided into headings (1 for title, then 2 for chapters, and so forth) and the way paragraphs are always set off by <P> tags;  furthermore, "class" and "span" tags are used very sparingly,and "font" tags never at all. [note: If there is any mechanism for suppressing <font> or <span> tage inserted into Drupal, this should be done.]
2) PRESENTATION STRUCTURE. More than one stylesheet is used, to give some sections of the site (eg publications or triennials) a layout more suited to the medium, but all stylesheets have the majority of elements in common. [note: the Triennial pages, and any other pages which run under a different domain name as part of WRI's web work, should look sufficiently different from the site's mainstream content while still being integrated enough with the overall look and feel of the site. This can present a design challenge when more than one designer is involved.]
3) GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE. The articles are all written in clear English (or Spanish, or French, or German) and commonly used language is consistent -- particularly the use of gender neutral language, but also the use of key WRI-related terms and the general tone, should be consistent.

A LANGUAGE NEUTRAL GATEWAY
The page wri-irg.org/index.html should continue to be a language-neutral gateway to the individual language homepages. In my country this is absolutely standard, for government agencies and bilingual NGOs alike.

QUOTING THE WRI URL IN PRINT AND IN LINKS

Wherever possible, the root URL of the site should be given as http://wri-irg.org/[directory and page]. The reason for not using the www prefix is that the number of consecutive W's is visually confusing and detracts from people remembering the address as a dual acronym. It also helps in Google ranking if the page is linked through its more common name.

THE WIKI PROBLEM

My inclination would be to suspend the wiki for some time -- until people are used to the basics of the CMS -- and then (if there is a need) re-introduce it, linking it at first to a specific project.

PRINTABLE VERSIONS OF PAGES

Print-friendly stylesheets have been standard throughout the site for several years now. Basically, text is reduced to 9pt, with limited leading between paragraphs and proportionately smaller headings. Colour elements are reduced to black and white. Navigation elements are largely removed (except for the stylesheet selector menu). Photos are retained, however, with reduced dimensions.

Material produced to be printed (eg Broken Rifles, posters) are offered in PDF as well as HTML; these PDF files are slightly reduced versions of the office's own print-quality output files, usually also downgraded to PDF 1.3 (acrobat 4) for greater compatibility.

Drupal has a "save as PDF" option for its generated pages, but there are problems with auto-generating PDF output from an HTML page - namely, the end user has no control over page breaks (or over paper size -- A4 versus North American letter size). Moreover, the PDF module should be checked for version compatibility (see above paragraph). In any case, the PDF module should (if it does not already) use the same print stylesheet as is used for HTML -- imprinting some sort of standard WRI colophon (not just the website's URL, but address and Creative Commons/GNU licence details as well) at the foot of the article.