Earth Journalism Network aims to promote environmental journalism in developing countries by offering a platform for journalists worldwide to report on environmental topics. Internews also offer various scholarships throughout the year, sponsoring journalists to attend and report on worldwide environmental events and conferences.
During the first stage of this project we replicated functionality in a clean 'Drupal way' using CCK, views, Features and Rules.
In stage two we rebuilt the theme. Keeping in mind EJN's primary audience are journalists living and working in developing countries, we kept the html, css and graphical output as lightweight as possible. The newly available W3 CSS3 roadmap assisted us in selecting appropriate properties such as gradients, shadows and rounded corners to keep the visual appeal high without hogging precious bandwidth.
Fully aware that not all browsers are compatible with css3, especially knowing a portion of our audience will not be using the most modern of hardware, we used the css3pie library to support less competent browsers and to provide graceful degradation.
Stage three consisted of further extracting existing functionality into Features and perfecting a dev-staging-production workflow based on Features, Drush, and Aegir.