Casestudy
Working with Forest and Bird
Forest & Bird (New Zealand’s leading independent conservation organisation) chose to work with Sparks Interactive to relaunch their website. The new forestandbird.org.nz is built using Sector, and was released into the wild in June 2018.
The Forest & Bird website was the first large scale implementation using the Drupal 8 distribution of Sector - released just a month after the release of Sector D8. The site was successfully launched in June 2018 to positive feedback from the community.
In October 2018, Sector and the Forest & Bird project were recognised at the New Zealand Open Source Awards - winning the award for Open Source Use in Business.
Contributions to Sector and where to next?
Successful open source projects rely on businesses and end-users to participate in the design process. The collaboration between Forest & Bird and Sparks Interactive (the main maintainer of the open source Sector project) allowed Sector to advance and grow as a whole.
Main contributions back to Sector include:
- The approach to media file management configuration in Sector D8
- Many improvements to the admin user interface based on feedback from the editorial team.
Forest & Bird’s feedback was included in recent Sector updates and releases - improvements that will benefit Forest & Bird as well as other organisations using Sector in the future.
Highlights of the forestandbird.org.nz project
Allowing Forest & Bird to focus on what's important
Using Sector allowed Forest & Bird to keep implementation costs low. This meant they could concentrate on content and design - creating a user experience that engages and effectively connects with their wide audience base.
The website allows F&B to promote their current campaigns as well as raise funds via donations - contributing to their aim of protecting wildlife and wild places, on land and in the sea.
Supporting a range of content
The website uses Sector’s dual toolset to support both hierarchical content (content in traditional menu trees) and data-driven content (content accessed via filtered views and searches). This allows the site to work with a flat hierarchy and provide easy access to campaigns, volunteer opportunities, branches, and resources.
Using Sector’s pre-configured resource database, Forest & Bird have been able to build up their resource library - publishing a wide range of resources to help their users bring positive change to New Zealand's land, fresh water, oceans and climate.
Other examples are the campaigns and the projects that can be filtered by type, region, branch, or topic.
Contributing content from all over the country
Using Sector’s customisable user roles and permissions setup, the new site includes a maintainable data-driven management system for the 50 Forest & Bird branches located throughout New Zealand.
Branch users are able to add and independently manage Branch contacts, Projects, Resources and Events. This removes editorial hurdles and allows the Forest & Bird corporate team to collaborate with the branches and integrate branch content throughout their site.
Reaching a wide audience
Another objective for the new site was to reach the widest possible audience - wherever they are, and on whatever devices they use.
Forest & Bird website as viewed on smaller screens.
Using Sector, Forest & Bird based their responsive frontend on the Sector Starter theme and the open source HTML, CSS and Javascript framework Bootstrap. This made it easier to kick start the design process, lower costs, and create an excellent user experience across screen sizes and devices.