Using Drupal 6 Multisite & Organic Groups to promote environmentally friendly commuting

Komimo, an organising platform bringing together several environmental/mobility non profits in Belgium, runs two yearly campaigns to promote environmentally friendly commuting. Since last week Friday, their campaign websites run Drupal!

During both Komimo campaigns, people are encouraged to take trains, ride their bike, use trams or buses instead of driving their car to work. The campaigns run every spring and fall, and consist of several actions, mobilising and awareness-raising activities. One of the main spring campaign initiatives is 'ik kyoto', a contest that invites employees to challenge one another to come to work generating as little CO2 as possible.

The Komimo project contains four websites, three of them running Drupal:

1) http://varieerinhetverkeer.be used to be a separate website explaining the spring and fall campaigns. To simplify the user experience, we transformed it into a simple landing page, guiding people to either the spring or fall campaign sites, that already contains this general information.
2) http://heen-en-weer-week.be, the spring campaign's website.
3) http://ikkyoto.be, the commuting challenge website (during the spring campaign).
4) http://aardig-op-weg-week.be, the fall campaign's website.

Multi site + subthemes rocks!

For the spring and fall campaigns, we used Drupal's (awesome) multi-site feature, which allows you to run several sites on the a single Drupal installation. Since both sites offer similar functionality, this seemed like an obvious thing to do, as a multi-site set up simplifies hosting (we host these sites on our own VPS) and overall maintenance.

Since all four websites belong to the same project, they needed a common design & branding. Since Komimo has a limited budget available for web communication (as do most non profit organisations), hiring a designer to create this common design & branding was not an option. Instead, we looked through Drupal's contributed themes repository, and found Analytic, a clean, modern and well written theme. Using Analytic as a starting point, we developed an appropriate theme ourselves, re-using several elements from Komimo (printed) campaign material. You can see the common header below.

To make a visual distinction between the spring and the fall campaign, we created two subthemes with a different color scheme, using the 'base theme' declaration in our subthemes' .info files. For a second release of the project planned for the end of February (see below), we'll streamline this set up some more: we'll put the base theme in the /sites/all folder of the multisite Drupal installation, while the subthemes will reside in /sites//themes.

Integrating user registration, Content Profile and Webform

The website we built for the 'ik kyoto' ('I Kyoto') contest that is organised during the spring campaign, is currently running on a separate Drupal installation (this is also likely to change when we roll out this project's the next release). During the first phase of this contest, companies can register on the site. During the registration process, they had to be able to enter their company's info, along with a contact person's details. To accomplish this, we used Content Profile and its recently added 'Content Profile User Registration' submodule. The latter allows you to attach a content profile node's fields to the user registration form.

Next to supplying her information, a new user had to be able to order campaign material (flyers, posters, ...) and answer a short survey during the registration process. The ordered campaign material and survey results needed to be easily reviewed and exported to a spreadsheet application for further processing. Fortunately, there's the Webform module, that offers all of this functionality out of the box. We created two webforms (one for the orders, one for the survey) and included them in the user registration form using some hook_form_alter() magic. We also wrote an additional submit handler to send off the entered data to the appropriate webform by means of a drupal_execute(). Currently, both webforms are manually (as in: not dynamically) added to the user registration form. In a following release, we'll include these forms dynamically, and if all goes well, we may write a generic contrib module that provides this functionality (adding webforms to the user registration form).

Phased roll out

Once the companies' registration phase has finished, we'll launch the employee registration process, which will include Organic groups registration. Since we selected the content profile's node type as the group's node type, we're automatically creating the correct groups during the employers' registration phase. To allow employees to find their employer (ie. the group they want to subscribe to), we'll probably have to tweak the OG registration process somewhat. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

In a third phase, employees will be able to register the distance they travel by bike, train, tram, ... and compare these with the commuting habits of their colleagues. They will be invited to challenge each other to travel as environmentally friendly as possible.

Training

Next to developing these four websites, we also trained the Komimo staff to be able to update their websites and to manage registrations and campaign material orders. Even though we didn't invest a great amount of time tuning the admin interface, we found that most of the Komimo people felt pretty much at ease doing basic Drupal administration: adding/editing nodes, moving blocks around, uploading new images, ... All we really did was installing the Administration menu module and set the correct user permissions (which, along with securing your site, simplifies the admin interface for novice Drupal users).

The ease with which the Komimo staff definitely had to do with our use of the Nodes In Block module, which allows you to use a node directly as the content of a block. This way, you allow admins to rapidly create new blocks (and, more importantly, get the blocks' content right) and place them somewhere on the site.

So, in the coming weeks, we'll be finishing and rolling out the next phases of this project. Overall, it's really cool to be able to use Drupal to make the world a less car intensive and a more bike/public transport friendly place!