The IGC
The goal of the International Growth Centre (IGC), is to "promote sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research". The IGC is a joint initiative by two leading centres of study, LSE and the University of Oxford. The project is support by the Department for International Development (DFID) and co-ordinated by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Cameron & Wilding were involved in three activities: upgrading, implementation of Drupal best practices and ongoing support and maintenance.
Upgrade
The original IGC website was built on Drupal 5 and both the core and contributed modules were several versions behind the most up to date code. Before upgrading the site to Drupal 6, an audit of the existing code was carried out to ensure no functionality was lost in the upgrade process.
Best Practices
An important part of the work on IGC was the implementation of Drupal best practices. Within Drupal, certain tasks can be accomplished in multiple ways, especially when one has a background in PHP and MySQL. The result of this is that many sites are created in non-standard ways. This creates a number of problems such as making the website harder to upgrade and harder for a new team to understand the information architecture.
Some of the best practices carried out included:
- Converting hard coded MySQL queries to views
- Separating out logic and presentation in theme files (.tpl.php)
- Normalising the file system (separating out core and contrib modules)
- Converting plain text fields and logic to link fields, email fields and file fields
Support and Maintenance
C&W currently provide maintenance and content management support to the academics. We ensure all security updates are applied to the site, track site statistics and carry out content and user management tasks.
Client Benefit
The IGC site is now a solid and secure foundation for the development of new functionality. The support services provided by C&W allows users to focus on research and policy formation, without having to worry about the website.
