Client profile
The Food for Life Partnership is a network of schools and communities across England committed to transforming food culture. The partnership aims to reach out through schools to give communities access to seasonal, local and organic food, and to the skills they need to cook and grow fresh food.
The network is partially lottery funded and also supported by the Soil Association, The Focus on Food campaign, the Health Education Trust and Garden Organic.
Site: www.foodforlife.org.uk
Brief
The brief for the new Food for Life site was to produce a wholly updated site based on DNN technology and incorporating a comprehensive, categorised resources section. The resources section was required to be edited and maintained by network partners who would provide content in the form do downloadable documents, video clips and images etc.
The site development was sponsored by and to be managed by The Soil Association. The decision to use DNN naturally followed from the recent successful re-development of the Soil Association site using DNN.
Chord9 was contracted to provide site configuration, custom skin development and video integration. A key requirement for the Resources section was that site editors could ‘add video’ simply and without the need for any technical knowledge.
The visual design work was undertaken internally by Soil Association’s own designers. Chord9 was subsequently briefed to create custom skins conforming to these new designs.
Solution
A custom DNN skin package was developed comprising several distinct page layouts to accommodate the homepage, landing page, general content, search and admin views. Custom menu components were developed and integrated into the skins to improve search engine visibility and intuitive navigation.
The Resources section was constructed around a highly customisable 3rd party news/articles module. Custom fields were added to the articles entry form to enable editors to easily attach documents and media. A versatile video player (Flowplayer) was integrated into the skin package and configured so that editors need only to enter a simple URL pointing to the video file.