Website objectives

The Transition Network's aim is to "Transition Network's role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the ​transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions."

The main Transition Network website (www.transitionnetwork.org) helps by:

• raising awareness of the transition model, and encouraging more people, towns and cities to follow and develop it;
• allowing people and organisations in the movement to share news, resources and training events with each other;
• helping people to access practical training and support - formal and informal.

The main focus of the website is on information and news sharing. Some tools for discussion and collaboration are provided, but the "pull" to develop full-scale social networking tools has so far been resisted, in favour of providing tools to help people meet up in real life (aka. "​meat space") for their socialising and networking.

Key building blocks of transitionnetwork.org

Content types

Content types are one of the key building blocks of a Drupal system, and enable us to design the forms and fields that people use to add new content to the site. TransitionNetwork?.org as a lot of Content Types, which help a lot of different people publish through the site.

See the full list of Content Types for detailed information.

The Community Microsites is not such a high priority these days. We're not looking to phase it out, but the future may be more in WordPress multisite ideas...

Views

Break down of Transition Initiatives Directory view.

Panels & Context - layout and Block management

The Panels and Context modules are each an attempt to make it easier to manage large numbers of Blocks, especially where many of your Blocks appear/disappear dynamically, depending on which page you're looking at, or what your permissions are. There's some essential listening in this Lullabot podcast comparing the two modules: ​Panels vs Context, The Cage Match!.

The Transition Network website uses mainly Panels, although Context is installed and available.

There are some great introductions to working with Panels available on YouTube. Check out ​Creating A Custom Page Using Panels (and skip to 3:00).

Permissions, or "Roles"

We use Drupal's Roles to wrap up the main day-to-day tasks within our organisation into sets of permissions. Broadly speaking, the different kinds of people using our site are:

• Site administrators
• Site editors
• Newsletter editors
• Site bloggers
• Site facilitators
• Voices - off-site blogers
• Community Microsite administrators
• Profile administrators
• Event add-ers
• Site contributors
• Twitter facilitators

The way our Roles and permissions are configured is guided by these different usage requirements. More ​detailed information on these roles is available on the main Transition Network Wiki. That page describes in non-technical language what people with a particular Role need to achieve on the website.

Organic Groups

Organic Groups (OG) is a Drupal module which allows groups of people to collaborate in their own "area" of the website. OG's main abilities are around managing permissions (giving group members permissions in their areas which they don't have on the rest of a site) and notifications (group members can get an email everytime something changes or something is added in their group).

In the Transition Network, we use OG to provide our Community Microsites. These are little used and very likely to be removed in 2013. So don't worry about them too much for now.

Rules

Rules is a powerful Drupal module which allows you to fire off all sorts of "happenings" when somebody interacts in a specific way with the website. Examples could be:

• "When the user named Joe Public logs in (the trigger)" -->
  • "redirect them to the home page and display a message saying 'Welcome back, Joe!' (the actions)".
• "When someone adds a comment to the site (the trigger)" -->
  • "send an email containing their message to all comment administrators (the actions)".

Features

• Initiatives Directory - Provides various views of Initiative Profiles
• Transition - alert web contacts - Transition - alert web contacts
• Transition Events - Provides Events content type and context, including relevant views pages, calendars, maps and upcoming plus blocks by Theme & Organic Groups.
• Transition import blogs - import transition blogs from around the world.
• Transition Network Projects - Project Profiles content and display.
• Transition News - Provides news stories from the network and wider Transition Movement. Includes content types and various views.
• Transition People - Provides User Profiles and related views.
• Transition PSE Widget - Core PSE widget support.
• Transition - raise alerts for profiles - Transition - raise alerts for profiles.
• Transition Themes - Provides Theme content type and related views.