Puffbox launches site for Djibouti presidential candidate


A month or two ago, to be perfectly honest, I would have struggled to find Djibouti on a map. But for the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a project to launch one man’s campaign to become its President: and the site went live this week.
Djibouti is a former French colony, located on the Horn of Africa, slightly larger than Wales, population well under a million. It’s a key port for the region. It also shares a border with Somalia, sits across the water from Yemen, and is home to large French and American military bases. And it’s having a Presidential election next year. The current incumbent won a second term in 2005, with a mere 100% majority; and this year, they changed the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term.
Djiboutian businessman Abdourahman Boreh has now declared himself an opposition candidate for next April’s election; he is being represented by a London-based PR consultancy, MHP Communications, who brought me in to build a website for the campaign: not voter-facing as such, more as a resource to help establish his credentials internationally.
The site is built on WordPress: primarily pages rather than posts, at this early stage anyway. But significantly, it’s in two languages – English and French, with a long-term possibility of adding Arabic. It soon became clear that fudging the multilingual functionality wouldn’t work: so it’s the first time I’ve used WPML, the leading WordPress plugin for content in more than one language.
To be perfectly frank, WPML has been a bit hit-and-miss. When it works, it’s absolutely brilliant: but some things just haven’t worked at all. I’ve had to deploy various workarounds, sometimes going as far as coding whole new plugins or widgets. And some features, even relatively run-of-the-mill things, I’ve simply had to drop. It’s a great solution for multilingual content; but be prepared for some unpleasant side-effects.
The feature I’m most proud of is also language-related; but is something I’ve coded myself. We’re inviting people to leave comments on most pages; and we’re using a WPML meta-plugin to merge the comment threads between translations. In other words, if you leave a comment on the English version, it’ll also appear at the bottom of the French version. But what if you don’t speak the other language?

Thanks to Google’s translation API, and a bit of jQuery, you can click on a link under each comment to translate it – instantly, and in place – into English or French. Oh, and Arabic if you fancy that too. Try it on this page… but don’t use up my entire API usage limit, please. Obviously we’re in Google’s hands as regards the translations’ quality: the French is certainly pretty accurate, and the Arabic… well, it looks about right anyway.
I’m also quite pleased with the ‘world time’ thing in the top corner: not only is it useful as a clock – but by placing dots on the map, it’s a subtle way of reminding people where Djibouti actually is; and it underlines the strategic connections with France and the US (plus, by extension, the UN). The times are generated based on proper timezone data, and hence should remain accurate all year.
This time round, I’ve done all the design and coding myself. But I’ve had help with the configuration of the WordPress platform, from none other than Mike Little, the man who co-founded WordPress. Mike knows far more about server setups than I (hopefully!) ever will; he’s done a great job tweaking things just that little bit more than normal: so whilst it’s hardly military-level secure, it’s certainly more robust than your average WordPress site – with very little compromising on usability.
It’s been a challenging project, taking me into new territory in several respects, and all the more enjoyable for it. It’s only by doing projects like these, and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, that you really improve as a designer / developer / producer.
So far, Puffbox has a 100% record with political candidates: every one we’ve ever worked for has been successful. We’ll see if this hot streak is maintained next April.

LibDems' underwhelming web revamp

When is a fixed-width page not fixed-width?

The world of Liberal Democrat websites is dominated, almost monopolised, by one company – Prater Raines, based in Folkestone. They offer local LibDem parties a corporate website template, plus mailing list facility, plus a shared photo library, plus hosting, plus email, plus DNS, etc etc, for a staggeringly low £250 (ish) a year. When a local party’s key concerns are typically ‘can it do what we need?’ and ‘can we afford it?’, their success is understandable: they host something like 600 sites in the extended LibDem family.
The catch is that every site on the Foci platform, as it’s known, looked more or less identical – which might be fine if that shared look-and-feel was any good. Unfortunately, to be frank, it wasn’t. Being charitable, the sites had begun to look very, very dated: tabular, text-heavy, and lacking in finesse. A clear case of technology first, design a distant second: laudable in some respects, but just not how the game works.
A revamp has been in the works for many months – since long before the general election, in fact – and finally this week, it’s been rolled out across the network: see the examples of Tim Farron, Don Foster, Sarah Teather or the specially souped-up site for Vince Cable. And in a word, it’s underwhelming.
The boxy, full-width layout is gone, replaced by a centred, 1024px-optimised format, sometimes single-column, sometimes two, sometimes three – so far, so good. There’s a hint of gloss in some of the screen furniture, some rounded cornering, even a bit of text-shadowing on the occasional headline. But there’s a definite feeling that they’ve bolted these ‘cool’ elements on top, without really buying into them.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is the aggregated list of site updates, which they’re calling homepage ‘lifestreams’. Hang on… homepage lifestream? Yes, they’ve clearly been inspired by my invention for Lynne Featherstone… except they’ve totally missed the point of it.
Left: not really a lifestream. Right: now that's what I call a lifestream.

Lynne’s lifestream pulls together her activity from multiple third-party sources: it helps readers see what she’s done lately, wherever she might have done it, and at a glance shows her to be very active across multiple social networks. But theirs seem to do no more than aggregate the different content types within the same site: and the token effort to distinguish the different content types fails, because the icons just aren’t strong enough. It’s just a list.
Ah – but then there’s the jQuery-based hover-to-slide thing. As you hover over each headline in the ‘lifestream’ (ahem), it quickly expands downwards to show the ‘excerpt’, and the previous one closes up. If you’re mousing over the list to get to a specific headline, it can be quite nauseating. But more importantly – it actually makes it harder to click on the link you’re interested in. Sometimes you’ll mouse-over your chosen link, only to find it gets moved by the animation, and you’re now clicking on something else… and the headline you wanted may well have disappeared off the bottom of the screen.
Prater Raines deserve a huge amount of respect for their success in this field. Their tremendous economies of scale have allowed them to put together an offering which is, to all intents and purposes, unbeatable. They clearly know their technology. But this was the opportunity to make up for their offering’s presentational shortcomings, at precisely the moment when LibDems, locally and nationally, need a presentational boost… and they haven’t taken it.

DCLG's WordPress questionnaire


Just a quick post to record that Communities and Local Government have launched what I believe is their first WordPress-based project: Barrier Busting. Based – apparently – on something originally done by BIS, although I don’t immediately recognise it, it’s a fairly modest site built around a one-page survey form, asking people about the ‘bureaucratic barriers’ preventing them doing something in their community.
By the look of it, the form – and the processing code behind it – is hard-coded PHP, dropped into a WordPress custom page template. It’s quite a nice reminder that WordPress itself isn’t the end of the possibilities: by definition, if you’ve got WordPress installed, you’ve got PHP installed, and you can code whatever you like around the standard WordPress theme code. The work has been done by Lancaster-based Netfundi, who have a well-established relationship with DCLG.

Cabinet Office heralds shift to Drupal


Make no mistake about it: today’s launch of the new Cabinet Office website isn’t just a much-needed facelift for the least usable departmental site in Whitehall. It’s a signal of things to come.
The new site is pretty, modern, and at first glance, very well put-together. There’s evidence of planning for re-use, with the simultaneous launch of a nearly-but-not-quite identical website for the Deputy Prime Minister. Good integration of social stuff, and multiple RSS feeds. And all built on an open-source publishing platform. Specifically, Drupal.
I’ve been sensing a steady shift towards Drupal at the Cabinet Office (and in its immediate vicinity) for some time now; and in fact, I’m told this project has been running since before the election, not always smoothly either. But things can only have been accelerated by the arrival of the Conservative team – including Rishi Saha, who masterminded the MyConservatives.com system, also built on Drupal.
Now the Drupal platform is in place, don’t be at all surprised to see Downing Street going down the same road; ‘practise what you preach’ and all that, given Martha Lane Fox’s pronouncements on the desirability of (total) web convergence. And then?
I’m delighted to see them coming over to open-source: a move, of course, effectively announced by Francis Maude back in June. Of course it would have been nice if it had been WordPress rather than Drupal, for reasons I’ve written about before. But that’s no reason not to welcome this as another step forward. Good on them; and I hope it works out. We’ll find out how much it cost in a matter of weeks, no doubt.

Confirmed: skunkworks running late

The Cabinet Office’s latest structural reform plan admits that they’ve missed the November 2010 target for establishing a ‘government skunkworks’… but there is progress to report.

Good progress has been made on IT skunk works with development lead appointed, a concept developed and a CIO-Council led initiative in place to help shape development of skunk works as part of their remit to set the way ICT projects and programmes are planned, designed, procured and managed.

No actual date, though. Anyone know who the development lead is?

Skunkworks status update

I think I had my first Mr Kipling’s mince pie of the festive season as long ago as September. Yes, it had the festive holly on the top; and amusingly, it had a best before date well before 25 December. But now, with two doors open on the advent calendars, I can now confirm it’s officially December. So where’s our IT government skunkworks?
As I noted back in June, the project to form a crack IT development team at arms-length from ‘proper’ IT, action point 1.12.iv to be specific, was due to be completed by the end of November. The transparency.number10.gov.uk website is still listing it as ‘in progress’, due for completion in November.
So I’m grateful to Mark O’Neill for tweeting me in the direction of this event next week at the Institute for Government, which promises ‘an opportunity to explore the Skunkworks project – an initiative from the Cabinet Office being rolled out to develop faster and cheaper ways to develop IT applications.’ Mark will be speaking at the event, as will DWP’s Steve Dover, and a representative of ‘Agile specialists’ IndigoBlue (whose website runs on Drupal, by the way).