Prevention Institute was founded in 1997 to serve as a focal point for primary prevention practice—promoting policies, organizational practices, and collaborative efforts that improve health and quality of life. As a national non-profit organization, the Institute is committed to preventing illness and injury, to fostering health and social equity, and to building momentum for community prevention as an integral component of a quality health system. Prevention Institute synthesizes research and practice; develops prevention tools and frameworks; helps design and guide interdisciplinary partnerships; and conducts training and strategic consultation with government, foundations, and community-based organizations nationwide and internationally.

The entire staff at Prevention was super during the development process. I especially worked well with Annie Lyles, my main point of contact on the project. Annie is much more of a visual person than I am, so in order to communicate effectively, we even set up our own language to refer to the tools on the website. Because the timeline of the project was quite long, I definitely was able to establish a fun relationship with the team at Prevention.

We worked with Free Range Graphics on the design for the new site.  Because the site was designed with such specificity, it required Prevention to really get familiar with editing html to maintain the same look and feel that they wanted. Lily Swartz, Erica Valdovinos and Shivani Mohan were the wonder-gals who really were the backbone of seeing this site get launched.  I trained each of them on the most advanced features of Joomla! and basic html to get the really nice headers you see on pages such as this.

One specific challenge that we all had was managing the amount of resources that Prevention has for their constituents. For this, Kevin and Michael did an amazing job of integrating PICnet’s Taxonomy Extension with our jLibrary Extension. Taxonomy is what gives the website its tagging system; the ability to create more dimension and relation to the content.  jLibrary acts as a document and file management system within Joomla! so that users can give more breadth to an entry such as multiple uploaded documents, multiple authors, a description and file types.

Some interesting moments on the project came when figuring out how to store the huge amount of resources Prevention has for their constituents. A few server moves, re-uploading of files and some massive traffic hits led to a few chaotic incidents, but the all of our teams worked hard together to gain something: an increase in security and tracking that Prevention can use to better monitor their site.

As this was a long-term project (a year in the making!), we got to work with every department at Prevention as they oversaw their respective areas of the website. It showed us how highly meticulous and very collaborative the organization is. We still have more to do – we continue to work on the Strategic Alliance Intiative and Thrive Tool areas!

One example of a specific department that had its own mini-project was the UNITY Initiative. For this area of the site, the staff wanted an interactive eLearning solution for their eight instructional modules. Ryan, our designer, found the Wildform Flair package which was an affordable interactive slide application that can transform Power Point slides to a Flash movie. My point of contact for this was Virginia Lee who did a superb job in mastering both Joomla! editing and Flair. It was a first for all of us. The Equity Initiative team is currently showing this piece to a beta population and once they get feedback, it will be published to the live site for all users.

Ryan also did a fabulous job putting final touches on jLibrary so that in comparison with some other clients, one wouldn’t recognize the tool! Here is an example of a record.  If you are looking to design out your jLibrary install, please talk to support about getting Ryan to design you something similar!

The idea behind the program is that, by combining their assets, participants may obtain lower costs for the investment of their funds and access to better performing investment managers than each would otherwise have.

Here are some of our favorite, and notable features for the new site:

• Flash maps that display where the reach of their socially responsible investing in the United States and around the world
  
• Use of a taxonomy product PICnet built to classify the socially responsible investments not just by geographical area but by Type of Investment, making the information more accessible to site visitors while not increasing administrative overhead on staff to upkeep the site

Mercy Investment Services is connected to the Sisters of Mercy Communities,  for whom we’ve built several community sites. You can read more about those here and here.

Just 30 minutes ago, we officially launched Soapbox 2.0.4, which gave us an opportunity to improve some key functions within our Taxonomy extension.  These improvements will make our Soapbox clients quite happy, and include key updates like the creation of  hierarchical term (or tag) structure for your content with a slick implementation of RSS feeds per term. You can also change the view of the term to be like Joomla’s Category List Layout or Section Blog Layout.

What does all this mean?  It means that you can now provide several ways for your audience to view an article/page without duplication, maintain a list of terms/tags without overcrowding your tag cloud, and better meet your audience’s hunger for specific tag-specific information.

Enjoy it! I know these folks will – Behind the Green.