The Retired Greyhound Trust is a national UK charity dedicated to finding good homes for Greyhounds once they have reached the end of their racing career – with the backbone of the charity being its network of over seventy satellite branches around the UK. RGT had a clear set of aims for their new website: to bring together the activities of their branch network, to allow each branch to manage their own sub-site but with consistent branding and to employ tools to leverage the maximum use from the information they collect from donors.
Working for Cosnetics, I was presented with a high-level specification along with a series of approved designs: using this as a starting point I went on to design and implement a custom ASP.NET web application that tightly integrates with a customised SugarCRM system.
- The underlying architecture of the site itself is built around a custom CMS, using MySQL as the database provider. The system expands on a traditional single-site CMS to host a main “head office” site along with sites for each of the branches. The application allows for content to be forced from the main site to branch sites, and for the branch sites to integrate their individual “Event Diary” data back onto the main charity site.
- The website has been implemented to be fully standards-compliant and cross-browser compatible back to IE6. Whilst the main navigation is built and displayed dyanmically using JQuery, it remains fully accessible via a degrading “noscript” version.
- In addition to the CMS content, the site also features “user generated content”, allowing users to upload photos and YouTube video links. The system presents uploaded content in “Web 2″ style monthly galleries, and all content is subject to a moderation queue that is fully integrated into the admin area.
- Several custom modules were developed for SugarCRM, recording data such as details of the satellite branches and their staff, information about donors to the charity and details of the dogs available for adoption (and subsequent details of their adoptive owners once homed).
- The SugarCRM system and website are tightly integrated, with the site consuming a custom SOAP service written for Sugar. The site includes functionality for managing the data stored in the CRM, and includes features such as capture of “Contact Us” messages into SugarCRM Contacts.
